[parpfish]

i've gone back and forth on this over the last few months.

I started out thinking that we've all been conditioned by bad customer support chatbots whose only purpose is to look up facts from the FAQ and then tell you to call the real customer support line to actually handle your problem. the problem was that the chatbots weren't granted hee ability and authority to actually do things. wouldn't it be great if you could aks a bot to cancel your account or change your billing info and it would actually do it?

but then i realized... anything with a clearly defined process or workflow like that would be even better if it were just a form on an account settings page. why bother with a chatbot?

customer support lines run by humans exist for two reasons: - increase friction for things you don't want your user to do (like cancel their account without first hearing a bunch of sales pitches) - handle unanticipated problems that don't fit into the happy-path you've set up on the settings page

My worry is that business dudes will get excited about making chatbots that can do the former and they'll never trust an AI to be able to handle the later. So I'm now of the opinion that having AI customer support will only be used to make things worse.

[QuantumGood]

Customer support isn't paid well, so they often aren't motivated to become very skilled beyond the level of a chatbot before they move on to other things. So the interface to bad docs doesn't matter much. And good docs are very hard to produce. AI magnifies problems when good docs are lacking.

[Aachen]

> aren't motivated to become very skilled beyond the level of a chatbot

Everyone has some amount of common sense. The current state of the art does not, so it cannot make decisions. This is why these things can't currently replace real support beyond being a search function exceedingly capable of interpreting natural language queries and, optionally, rephrasing what the found document says to fit onto the query better

You can't even have these systems as first line support, verifiying whether the person has searched the docs because you can't trust it with a decision about whether the docs' solutions are exhausted and human escalation is needed. There currently simply needs to be a way to reach a human. I'm as happy as the next person to find that a no-queue computer system could solve my problem so I use it when my inquiry is a question and not a request, but a search function is all they are

[QuantumGood]

Chatbots are loaded with issues. But I have also had a lot of issues with humans.

By the time I have an issue, I have usually covered basic ideas and FAQs already. Currently, I tend to use perplexity supported by ChatGPT before engaging online tech support, and I create a document for them before beginning.

[t-writescode]

> Customer support isn't paid well

"We choose not to pay customer support well".

I've worked at companies where customer support was both strongly supported, paid well and given the tools to do their jobs well.

They were incredible.

[QuantumGood]

Microsoft used to have some managers do support calls. Absolutely amazing service.

[foobazgt]

There's a third case: dealing with folks who just aren't technically savvy enough to figure some things out on there own, no matter how intuitive, well documented, or fully featured your product is.

I think I'd rather troubleshoot with a well-scripted AI chatbot, than a human being who's forced into the role of an automaton - executing directly from a script. Just, FFS, let me escalate to an actual competently trained human being once I've been through the troubleshooting.