[hienyimba]

The "AI" "agent" "helpdesk" they pivoted into is such a grift. AI agents still does not solve the main issues that makes a person contact support in the first place. How do I know? I was a founder in the space.

but good for them that they got salesforce to buy it.

[agenticfish]

Since we're sharing anecdotes, I work in this space and my team automated a large part of customer support for a large scale up using an AI agent. The kicker is that customers rate their interactions with the AI agent higher than their interactions with customer support staff.

AI is definitely capable of taking on customer support work at the moment, and to a high standard as well. Sure, it's not perfect. But it's not a grift either.

[HtmlProgrammer]

Solving 80% of menial support tickets automatically through agents trained on your help center, freeing up your actual support agents to focus better on meaningful tasks seems a tiny bit more than a grift.

I’m not sure where you’re getting this from but their customers find Fin to be a hugely impactful tool

[embedding-shape]

I guess I'll bite, what is this main issue that seemingly everyone but you are able to see?

[lubujackson]

The reason people want to get a human on the other end of the line is usually because they want some sort of remediation,like a refund or need to escalate something to someone who can take an action. Right now, AI agents just barf the FAQ back at you. Which is great for your tier 0 calls, but without an easy way to bypass they are just underlining the problem inherent in gethuman.com needing to exist.

Now if AI agents are free to issue refunds or discounts by their own? Great, let's do that and suddenly most people are on board. But get ready for rampant abuse.

Best solution would be an AI cyborg system where it readies a recommendation and a human swings by and approves or denies it without wasting time talking to people. But users would hate that (anti-social), it would still be ripe for abuse. But it is likely the longer term solution, as people will quickly realize they can use web chat or Google AI to get the exact responses as your FAQ bot which means you have removed actual customer service and this is a non-product.

[irishcule]

The newest AI Agents are much more advanced that "FAQ bots", they kind of have hybrid deterministic and non-deterministic flows in how they handle customer requests, depending on the request.

Some companies set them up exactly as you describe, they handle the low effort, easy to solve issues and then escalate to a human for "bigger" things. There is still a lot of value in that process as now maybe 76% of your customer requests are solved without human intervention and the humans agents can focus on the more meatier requests.

Some companies do not though, I know of Airlines using AI Agents with full flight re-booking flows happening end to end with no human intervention and its working well.

I think AI Customer Service Agents have already moved beyond what you yourself have personally witnessed.

[Tadpole9181]

If I had to guess, there's two things they feel AI doesn't address:

1. People wouldn't need to contact support if you just made quality goods and services. Outside of rare exceptions and inquiries, of course.

2. AI has not advanced enough to trust it outright, nor does it have a physical body. So it can't really do anything you wouldn't already just be able to put in the UI for the customer, without needing it's actions reviewed and confirmed by an accountable human. See: accidental truck giveaways.

So investing into AI support over making your business better is seen as misallocation. And using AI support instead of just improving the service is seen as inconvenient. And using AI support when it needs humans to do the support anyway is seen as inefficient.

[embedding-shape]

> People wouldn't need to contact support if you just made quality goods and services

It'd be weird to start a startup around that, sounds like something for a consulting business instead, parent specifically mentioned they've founded customer support startup, must be something actually related to customer service, I'm assuming.

[ceejayoz]

Talk to random non tech people about customer service bots for five minutes and you’ll find most people see it.

[embedding-shape]

I'm guessing parent is not talking about something super obvious to the rest of us, that'd be disappointing.