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by StevenWaterman 294 days ago
I'm currently working on adding a bot to our support chat at TalkJS. And it's great, it has probably a 90% success rate at handling complex queries. But that's because we're throwing money at it. That chat is normally staffed by senior devs, meaning it's not unusual for a single response to cost $10 of labour.

If you approach it as a cost cutting exercise, you end up with crap. If you approach it as a way to make a better experience while you sleep, it's achievable.
1 comments
ori_b 294 days ago
If you're not treating it as a cost cutting exercise, how much are you spending per query on the chatbot, and what is that $10 budget per query going towards?

Can you give some examples of complex queries that it's handled?

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zdragnar 294 days ago
Not OP, but I think you're missing one aspect- senior engineer time doesn't scale well, because there's not just wage but also opportunity cost of context switching and taking them away from tasks that might contribute to increased sales or revenue. More sales also means needing to hire more people if the support load is constant per customer.

If a chatbot can reasonably succeed at eliminating some of that workload without also driving existing customers away, it's a net win even if the budget between senior salary time and chatbot query is identical.

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ori_b 293 days ago
The parent poster was saying that it wasn't about cost savings, and yet all that you talked about was cost savings.
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