[carlosjobim]

For people like you and me, the only reason for contacting support is when a human decision is needed, ie the UI doesn't allow us to do what we need. This is always the company's fault, and a chatbot is of no use in these cases.

But many people will contact support instantly when they think of something, no matter what. Even if the website and other customer-facing material is crystal clear and has all information necessary.

AI chatbots is the way a company deals with the latter, because these customers most of all want a conversation. The question is if they will be satisfied with a robot, or still demand to talk to a person.

[mrweasel]

I still think this happens because the self-service solution aren't good enough and information isn't available where it needs to be. E.g. why is operational status for my ISP buried five pages deep behind an obscure link in a footer.

[dzhiurgis]

But chatbots can make decisions too.

[carlosjobim]

If they can, then it's going to be a nightmare for companies when people manipulate the bot to give them what they want, or a refund, etc.

It's practically putting these decisions in the hands of the customer, and if that's what you want to do, then why not put those functions into the customer facing UI to begin with?

[CWhiting]

I thought I remembered seeing this somewhere already where an AI chatbot was being tricked into producing working 50% off discount codes?

P.S. It was 80% and I read it 4 months or so ago: https://archive.is/20260311192059/https://medium.com/techx-o...

[dzhiurgis]

Much cheaper than having dedicated support tho.

[vanuatu]

the whole value prop of these companies is they can build you agents that perform actions (e.g process refunds, live troubleshooting, claims etc) without being manipulated

[carlosjobim]

Why would you need an agent for that? They need to look at a database or some rules to make their decisions anyway, so why not make a normal system to let the customer self-serve?

[vanuatu]

An agent is self serve. Even better because they can disambiguate intent at the top level

The average person gets frustrated with finding instructions and forms, they just wanna say “give me a refund” and an agent can execute it autonomously

[dzhiurgis]

This.

It's been blatantly obvious for years now that the future is where we have single agent that works out kinks and problems for you. Astonishing, but most companies don't want you to do that, almost like they are dedicated to prevent you to have great ux. IMO few more years and shit like AI tarpit and captcha will be made illegal.

Gudnaet.

[dzhiurgis]

> why not put those functions into the customer facing UI

The whole reason of having support is because edge cases are never ending.