[SV_BubbleTime]

I like the idea I read somewhere that AI text and agents break the social contract of communication. That if you can’t be fucked to write something yourself to me, then I shouldn’t bother to read it.

However, in the case of support agents. If it worked, and it was painless that would be something.

For example… On the company side, if it could reduce human support to the customers that actually need support, that’s cool. Your support agents aren’t spending all day with the three common issues or replacing stickers.

On the customer side; if I could call in and immediately get support without being on hold with their shit repeating audio script, didn’t have to spend 10 minutes “looking up my account” to an accent I can’t understand and repeating my name and address multiple times.

That said… AT&T is already using the absolute worst case scenario - they are currently using AI with a slight Indian accent and pretending it’s real peoples. It seems to be 90% automated, and if you question it about being AI or have a question it can’t understand a human pops in on the other side, interacts, then hops off and it goes back to being full-AI.

It could be great but it’s already awful.

[threetonesun]

The 3 common issues used to be solved by a manual with an FAQ page, or just you know, actually intuitive and usable software and hardware.

The real kick in the pants these days is spending a lot of money on something and trying to contact customer support over delivery or warranty issues. I'm convinced they just want you to give up and keep the sale (and lose a customer?) over ever resolving an issue. Or there's some internal metric that they're tracking that looks great and no one has ever actually used the system themselves.

[DoingSomeThings]

"The 3 common issues used to be solved by a manual with an FAQ page, or just you know, actually intuitive and usable software and hardware."

Having led customer support, this grossly misunderstands how people interact. People don't read. It's as simple as that. You can write something as clear as day in a FAQ, and they don't want to put in the effort. ~50% of the inbounds I receive are fully written out in plain language in an FAQ.

LLMs are perfect for this scenario. It puts the answer in clear english and will endlessly re-word the answer when clients followup.

[mrweasel]

What I don't get is why I need to go through an AI agent to do self-service. Without a human in the other end, I've basically relegated to solving the issue myself. The way I see it the AI is just acting as a text interface for a remote system, surely my issue could just as well be solved by implementing better self-service solution.

I don't know what others normally call customer service about, but in my case it's always something broken or a refund. The refund is doesn't need the AI, that's easily done with just a form. If somethings broken at my ISP for instance, then it doesn't really matter if the LLM or a form and some if-else skip-logic thingy sends the ticket to technical support.