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by bigtunacan 103 days ago
A delayed response doesn’t mean it’s not automated, just that it wasn’t built to not feel automated.

I worked on an automated reply system like this previously and we had intentional delays with randomness as well as variance in our responses to make it “feel more human”.
2 comments
avidiax 103 days ago
That's even worse. If it's going to be a bot, at least give the advantages of the bot and be somewhat honest about it.
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yetihehe 103 days ago
> give the advantages of the bot and be somewhat honest about it.

The advantage of a bot is for owner of a bot, not for those forced to use that bot. So, owners are incentivized to lie about bot usage.

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vidarh 103 days ago
Well, there can be an advantage in a bot too, if it can actually resolve some subset of problems faster and allows for more timely escalation of what is left. The problem is of course that is far too often not how they are used.
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yetihehe 103 days ago
> The problem is of course that is far too often not how they are used.

The underlying problem with today's world is that people only want to solve their problem at the cost of everyone else. Everything else (like bot's, ai) is only a tool which is used on the way to enrich an individual.

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avidiax 102 days ago
I think it runs deeper than that. Customers are overly swayed by the up-front cost of a product or service. They don't want to pay a little more for a product that has good customer service, at least not until that customer service is legendary in the industry, and often not even then.

We could have the Swiss model, which is a bit of a culture shock: the customer support line is a paid service like a premium rate 1-900 number. It's very hard to wrap your head around as an American, but it does result in customer support that's very fast, and they either solve your problem quickly or not. And there is an incentive alignment, where you pay for the good support as a separate service, so it should not affect the base price of the good.

In a competitive industry, paid support would be a win-win. High support customers pay for the support they use, and less demanding customers don't pay anything. And if the product needs lots of support because of quality, then customers can choose a competitor.

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thesuitonym 103 days ago
If the bot could resolve my problems, I would have resolved it already on the website.
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carlosjobim 103 days ago
Sure, but an instant response is almost guaranteed to be a bot.
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