[silisili]

Because the writing is on the wall already. Who hasn't been annoyed with "AI customer service", we already read about AI in the military, then you have the envisioned huge loss of jobs.

People generally seem to like using it as a chatbot, or answer questions, on their own terms. But anywhere it's been forced against the user asking for it has been a disaster.

[rozap]

Very true. I work for an AI company, I use it every day, it's a huge value add for certain problems.

My heat pump died the other day and I called an HVAC place and got an AI agent, which was frustrating and not helpful. So I called a different HVAC place and spoke to someone who could actually help, then I gave them lots of money.

[avdelazeri]

Similarly, I'm a grad school student studying AI (well, computer vision). When I called my internet provider to complain and ask for maintenance (a fool with a tall truck ran on our street and tore some of the cables) I could only get annoying AIs to talk with me. They kept arguing that my service was working properly despite the snapped cables. I reckon that the AI assistants were hallucinating the answer to a ping or something like that. I found another provider who actually gave me the option to talk with an actual human being and switched in the same day.

[odo1242]

Similarly: was calling apartments to ask about them / schedule a tour before I moved in, rejected the second best option specifically because they only had AI agents on the phone

[K0nserv]

I don't like AI customer service either, but having seen the other side it cuts down huge amounts of inbound queries (where the answer can usually be found in knowledge bases) and provides an answer faster than a human would. As long as the escalation path to talk to a human isn't too arduous it's not too bad.

[Sohcahtoa82]

Three things are true:

1. Most customers seeking support could solve their problem easily through self-service methods.

2. Some customers are running into edge cases that truly need a human to solve, and they should be able to get access to a human.

3. Making a human easy to get to results in a lot of people who are actually in group 1 but think they're in group 2 costing a lot of money in support staffing costs.

The anecdote I like to give is from my brother previously working at XBox Live support. 80% of his calls were password reset requests, something everyone could easily self-service right from the login page. These weren't "I tried that but I don't have access to the e-mail address I used anymore" cases[0], but the simple case. He'd trigger the password reset e-mail, the user would see the e-mail, and go through the reset flow. These users did not need a human, but were convinced they did, despite there literally being a "Forgot password?" button/link on every login page.

My other personal anecdote is overhearing my father-in-law calling up his cable company to pay his bill, something that's easier and faster to do online, but for some reason he'd rather talk to a human.

I get it though, sometimes you really DO need a human, but how do you make it easy to get a human when you need one without making it too easy to get one when you really and truly don't?

[0] Those DID happen, but were exceptionally rare, and a significant number of those calls were probably people trying to break into someone else's account.

[gspencley]

The word "need" is loaded and almost seems to be besides the point to me.

Your father-in-law wants to talk a human rather than self-serve. What's the problem with that? Honest question. The fact that he can self-serve is an undisputed fact. But why should he be expected to?

It might be more expensive for companies to offer the level of service that a lot of customers are asking for. If they want to offer that level of service they might have to raise their prices. If people want to pay those prices in order to get that level of service then who cares?

At thbe end of the day, a company is selling its products to people. And people come in all sorts of shapes and sizes and have all sorts of varied preferences.

There are people out there who do not want to own a smart phone. Who don't want to have to study a web page. They paid for something, they want it to "just work" and when it doesn't they want the burden of fixing it to be on the company they are giving their money to.

If a company doesn't want to offer that level of service, they don't have to. But they should expect to lose a certain demographic as a result. I don't think the chief complaint is that self-service options exist but that industries in general tend to chase trends. AI support can keep costs down for a company, great. But the trade-off for that is that there are people willing to pay more for human support and they often find themselves without options because everything always seems to be "all or nothing" with trends in business.

[Telaneo]

> My other personal anecdote is overhearing my father-in-law calling up his cable company to pay his bill, something that's easier and faster to do online, but for some reason he'd rather talk to a human.

I've had the same thing happen with my grandma. 'You know you can do X online [on a website she already uses for some other reasons]? - I don't want to do it that way.' If I start probing for an answer, she doesn't respond with anything tangible (she does in other cases, so it's not like she's incapable of explaining the problem at hand).

The only thing I can conclude with is that they either A.) want to do it the way it's always been done (applicable in some cases), or 2.) They want to do it the hard way. They somehow don't care that it takes 7 times the time and effort to do it whatever way they've figured out. Never mind that they're paying double the insurance rate they need to. They're fine with that. They're not fine with switching, since that will introduce change.

There's one case that sticks out in my mind that really was like this. I think it's a close relative of a whole family problems in IT along the lines of 'user has a 27 step process to convert a .docx to a PDF, which involves a printer, a scanner, a website, and probably more, and they also don't want to just 'export to PDF', since they're fine with the way their process works'. Most people seem to be happy to make processes like that more efficient, especially if they're done regularly. Others treat them like rituals, where nothing can change.

[munk-a]

I think the key issue here is that the people deciding how long the escalation path is isn't the humans (a fair few people do opt into search company FAQs for their answer before dialing a hotline - you're robbing those people in particular of their time by forcing them back through the same FAQ steps and discouraging the usage of those opt-in low cost resources) and, right now, consumer protection and rights are at an all time low so a fair number of AI rollouts have been downright customer malicious.

It absolutely has a place in the system - but that place (in the companies that do it well) starts by giving call center employees access to the AI as a fallback when they don't know an answer and reduces the amount of information and product specialization needed. Assuming it is ranked highly by internal teams then you can consider shifting it from being an internal tool to one exposed externally - instead, in a lot of cases, companies have just switched off the ability to dial in without going through the AI hoops and, in the worst cases, if there's a tech issue where the call center disconnects from the customer, the customer is forced to go through all those hoops again.

I like to emphasize that AI is a tool - it can be applied well in a considered and thoughtful manner - or it can be rolled out to every conceivable usage with reckless abandon... we're in a place where number two is the dominant approach.

[jon-wood]

The escalation path is always too arduous though, because most people still prefer to talk to a human when they’ve got to the point of opening a chat window. You’ve always got to jump through a bunch of hoops which are basically answering yes when asked whether you’ve tried reading the website.

[randycupertino]

Also the AI chat just straight up lies to you and is flat out wrong. When I landed in Peru and was trying to get my phone working, verizon AI told me my account had international calling set up and was working fine but when I finally got to a human they were like "oh I see what the problem is your account doesn't have that option activated, let me add it for you right now." It was a huge stressor as I was there for various meetings and couldn't call my contacts or use my phone! Trying to use the stupid AI agent wasted 2 hours of my jet-lagged time it was so miserable trying to get through to a human who could help me.

[K0nserv]

I don't doubt that's true for everyone who reads HN, but having seen the other side there are loads of people who don't make the effort and could've found their own answer in the knowledge base.

I find LLM customer service to be better than the historic dumber stuff. In those you can usually say "I want to talk to a human" and it will escalate. The customer service bots of yore were far dumber and made it harder to escalate.

[fusslo]

I had an AI agent lie to me

I called siriusxm to get them to turn off their stupid advertising on my in-car infotainment

I had called like 3 months ago to do the same thing. The human agent confirmed she turned it off on my account

I called again recently and asked the AI to turn off in-car ads and weather alerts. The ai INSISTED this was my car's manufacturer responsibility.

I kept yelling and swearing until it finally transferred me to a human. The human confirmed that it was a part of sirius AND that the feature was disabled (it turns out that disabled features on inactive accounts automatically become re-active on 'free weekends'. Holy fuck that seems illegal. the only way to disable features during free weekends is to have an active account (aka paying them)).

My next car is going to be seriously driven by a lack of connectivity, lack of sirirusxm. I'll buy a car where someone already figured out how to physically remove the radio

[ray_v]

I had an Amazon agent tell me that I should go and take my misdelivered packages off my neighbor's porch. I told it that that may look bad and I didn't want to get shot or have the police called on me.

The AI agent and I went back and forth for like 5 minutes before I got a person (I think!). When the human agent got on the chat I pretended that I had traumatic brain injury from slipping and falling trying to retrieve my misdelivered items.

[bean469]

> I called siriusxm to get them to turn off their stupid advertising on my in-car infotainment

I know that ads on radio always were and still are a thing, but on actual screens as well? This just gives another reason not to upgrade from my 2010 car.

[fusslo]

YES. it's absurd

The screen on my car displays navigation, climate/AC, & carplay. There is a pop-up dialog box that takes over the display and says either "special offer from sirius xm" or "Warning: extreme weather X miles away". The background of the popup is opaque so it blocks out the ENTIRE screen

I can't access navigation, radio, or climate controls until I dismiss the pop ups!

AND pop ups stack. I have a video in my phone of pressing 'dismiss' 23 times in a row before I am able to get back to navigation.

Imagine driving through a thunderstorm in an unfamiliar city and you have to dismiss 1-3 popups per mile to just see the map!

[peab]

> Who hasn't been annoyed with "AI customer service", who hasn't been annoyed with "customer service", period

[dimgl]

It's not envisioned. There have been mass layoffs and a lot has been pinned on AI, even if it's true or not.

[munk-a]

It's kind of hilarious, and a pretty obvious externality, most of these layoffs are clearly just restructuring that the companies want an excuse for but by labeling them as modernization and AI driven they've caused a major image problem for AI for the one thing it hasn't actually done much of (outside of really stupid companies - like the ones that fired their whole teams and moved their workforce to India as soon as they heard how cheap the labor was there).

[Simulacra]

I hate the AI customer service, from drive thru to call center AI complete with fake background sounds, I hate it all. As a customer I find it insulting.

[aix1]

Then why do you keep giving them your business? Have things gotten so bad where you live that there are no companies left who would treat you with respect?

[blindhippo]

In many cases - yes, they have gotten that bad. It's pure fantasy that we live in a free market - there are a handful of companies that own nearly everything, there is very little customer choice or power to "speak with your money".

I do agree though - if one doesn't like the way a company does business, do whatever you can to avoid giving them yours.

[cyanydeez]

I'm thinking it has more to do with the fascism of the oligarchs at this point. These are just thinwrappers over the failure of American democracy.