[toraway]

  > Agents (if implemented well) are an order of magnitude more effective at resolving issues compared to a call centre worker who is reading off a script and churn within 9 months

For this to be true, the agent needs to actually be given the means to solve the problem, otherwise an "agent" is just a glorified help page that wastes your time.

But it seems like companies don't want to do this part, possibly because of fears that someone will trick the agent into giving them a refund or something. Or because the actual goal is to optimize for fewer costly refunds/cancellations/policy exceptions etc.

So for whatever reason, they stay stuck in that useless local maxima while simultaneously making traditional help increasingly difficult to get ahold of when needed for an overall net worse experience as a customer.

[usaar333]

Voice agents have capabilities and policy to alter customer state. Just the other day I called into a CC company and the AI waived an interest charge.

[AlotOfReading]

Not all companies do that.

There's a certain vendor that requires me to place same-day orders by a specific time. You can easily place an order from the website. If you need to cancel one, you have to ignore the grayed out cancel button and call their cancellation support line. There you'll talk to an agent that doesn't have access to cancel orders, so you have to convince it that it can't help you before you can transfer to a real employee with the ability to hit the "cancel" button.

[yellottyellott]

and just today i talked to a bot about a missing item from an order and it had to call in a rep to push the button to ship me the replacement. except the rep’s messages seemed to filter through ai as well so what should have taken 20 seconds took 2m between messages. it could be good, but as the other commenter said some places are in a weird shittier hybrid model.

[vanuatu]

From what I've seen, it's the opposite -- the whole value proposition of these companies is to take on brand liability and allow the agents to autonomously take actions.

[mandeepj]

> possibly because of fears that someone will trick the agent into giving them a refund or something.

Refunds could require approval. And, it could not be just the agent's sole decision.