[Cthulhu_]

Doesn't need to be AI, most customer support was already automated before ChatGPT rose to prominence. Hell, I developed a mobile website once for a power company that was basically a wizard / checklist of "Have you checked for known outages? Have you checked your breakers? Have you checked if your neighbours have issues too?" before they were shown the customer service number.

Human contact doesn't scale, or is prohibitively expensive. I sat with customer support a while ago (again energy sector, but different company) to observe, and every phone call was at least ten minutes, often 20-30, plus some aftercare in the form of logging the call or sending out a follow-up email.

They also did chat at the time, where a chatbot (which wasn't ChatGPT / AI based yet but they're working on it) would do the initial contact, give low-hanging fruit suggestions based on their input, and ask for their information like their address before connecting to a real human. The operator was only allowed to handle two chats at a time, and each chat session took about half an hour - with some ending because the person on the other side idled too long. I mean granted, the UI wasn't great and the customer service guy wasn't a fast typer, but even then it was time-consuming and did not scale. They had two dozen people clocked in, if they were all as fast as this one person, they can handle 50 support calls an hour at most.

It does not scale. This was for a company with about 2.5 million users who rarely need customer support. Compare with companies like Google or Facebook that have billion(s) of users. They automated and obfuscated their customer support ages ago.

[Aachen]

24 people on 2.5 million users and you say it doesn't scale?

[gknoy]

    2.5 million users : 24 support staff
    1 billion users   : 9600 support staff

If it scales linearly, that's about 10k support per billion users. I was going to say that a 10,000 person department for handling customer support sounds like it doesn't scale, but maybe I'm wrong, given that that is only about 5% of google's headcount.

[Aachen]

Also in terms of costs: if those support staff cost 100 grand a year in salary and other costs, staffing the 2.5M-user company with those 24 support crew 24/7 (3 shifts, let's pretend it's equally busy at 3AM) results in some 25 cents per month per user that need to be priced into the product. The transaction fees on a monthly billing system are likely higher than that of a skilled support team if this is a representative scale for the industry

I frankly doubt the numbers, surely it costs more than this for an average company?