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by 9x39 11 days ago
It sucks because AI reduces call center costs in many toil tasks very effectively, regardless of whether you want to help or dissuade customers - it's just well-suited to the task and it's going to accelerate. It's a win for capital and the technology implementers, even if it's a loser for the call center employees and callers.

Some of the tech is pretty scary. One big vendor's solution [0] can provide not just AI agents but also use AI to snoop on calls in progress, evaluating sentiment from both sides [1], verifying phrases are said - pretty dystopian in theory. From experience, these things tend to go downhill based on the attitude at the top - is the mission to slash costs or take care of customers? A 1000 decisions follow from this one, and like Jira, it can be a useful tool or a prison-like hell.

[0] https://www.cisco.com/c/dam/en/us/products/collateral/contac...

[1] https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/contact-center/webex-...
2 comments
pydry 11 days ago
90% of the time when I call a call center I need a human to fix an organisational bug - e.g. faulty billing or some other kind of mixup. AI cannot help with this.

If it's to do something normal you could do through the website there was no need for AI - a website or app suffices - provided it isnt terrible.

Capital definitely thinks it can save costs here but capital is getting increasingly delusional these days.

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r0m4n0 11 days ago
The HN crowd is not the usual demographic for call centers. Im willing to generalize a vast majority of callers can find the info they are looking for if they tried a little
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pydry 11 days ago
Well, yeah. I'm definitely more tolerant of bad web UX than the average boomer.
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ACCount37 11 days ago
Neither can an average call center human.

A good 90% of call center humans are flesh interpreters for support scripts. They are being paid to act like they don't have free will.

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insane_dreamer 11 days ago
so far, almost always when I get an AI responder I find it useless and basically try to get to a human as quickly as possible

if it was easy enough for an AI responder to solve I would have solved it myself

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zx8080 11 days ago
> if it was easy enough for an AI responder to solve I would have solved it myself

<s>

Hey, company's AI can help a lot in stealing its service's user passwords, which you usually cannot do yourself _that_ easy:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48350239

Think of AI as a tool... for data leaks. </s> (not 100% sarcasm)

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