If talking to an ai is the cost of not being put on hold for 20 min for the simplest request so be it. Honestly I welcome ai customer service. Most of the time it's just something super simple i want to do.
I would prefer talking to an AI for business calls, because then I know I can get straight to the point without wasting time on being courteous, without having to worry about hurting someones feelings.
We use some AI for the first level of customer support. It can provide standard answers to common questions and help with routine action requests, but it is backed up by human operators for anything more complex and customers can opt out of the AI whenever they want. From customer surveys, they tend to like using the AI for simple things because it is faster and they get what they need. The like that they can get a human when they need too. If you aren't providing a human fallback, you aren't doing it right.
My view is that you need human customer service mostly for cases you can't serve with a self-service UI. And if you can't build a UI for it, you certainly can't build an AI for it. So the AI is necessarily less useful than either the human or the self-service interface.
A lot of companies expect big savings from AI customer service, so where do I assume wrong here?
I think people using AI for customer service are probably doing it entirely wrong. AI misunderstand hallucinate and your company is absolutely liable for the shit your AI says to your customer as we recently discovered.
The AI and the dumb things it may say ought to be the property and responsibility of the customers AI assistant whereas companies provide a machine parseable database of rules and intents which is to be consumed by users AI assistant.
The endpoints accessed by such intents are intentionally designed flows that insure there is no misunderstanding nor undue friction in helping the user give you more of their money.
User to their assistant: I want to want $SHOW, I see that I can rent it on amazon or add HBO so you can watch it.
User is shown a human designed disclosure of the continuing cost potentially with some surrounding add supporting the value proposition eg other shows people who want to watch $SHOW might also enjoy adding value to the pitch based on information willingly shared about originating purpose.
User: I want to cancel my service
User is transferred to a queue to either talk with someone immediately or schedule a call routing them to retention rather than general tech support.
If THEIR AI tells them that HBO is free or that they are entitled to a credit well THEIR AI told them that the company never did and the user gets the benefit of a singular interface rather than learning 95
Pretty much sure AI can do a better job at virtually negligible cost.
So instead of reading the same paragraph of a script at me in a loop when it doesn't know the answer to a question, the customer service agent is going to "hallucinate" an answer.
AI customer service might end up being a good thing. If a company faces a lawsuit involving systemically poor customer service they can shrug it off claiming individual employees made mistakes. If it's an AI, it's behavior can be reproduced and judged.
AI is a terrible replacement for most customer support cases, because usually you reach out precisely because the automated solutions on the website aren't working.
That said, there is a lot of money to be made in selling cost savings... And usually, the support team was outsourced and can only click the buttons on their support interface anyway, which means there is no loss of ability if an AI is limited to the same set of API calls.
I agree with you that AI probably won't have better than human customer reps access to systems and solutions.
Then again, most customer service reps are so limited that I can easily see an AI having an equal amount of power and discretion on the things customer service reps already do. Really this would just be a push people to the next tier of support type thing in my mind.
Why have all-knowing customer-support AIs waste their time and resources talking with underwhelming human customers such as myself? It would be much more efficient for customer support calls to be made by all-knowing personal assistant AIs, which can surely explain the nature of the problem much better than me, as well as being better able to infallibly put in practice whatever the all-knowing customer-support AI suggested.
I love chatbots that try solving your problems and redirect to an human if they can’t solve it. That’s a good use of “ai” (but an abuse of the “ai” term).
I’m firmly against pretending your customer support rep is human while an AI is working, or a human with very strict timing constraints is “using” such AI.
I'll talk to a chatbot if it can shortcut what customer service can do without asking a million obvious questions or making me wait.
~30% I've used it, Amazon's customer service chatbot handles issues like missing orders quickly. What it doesn't handle are more complex inquiries like getting a refund on Alexa celebrity voices.
Amazon started using AI for support a while back. The only time I've had to interact with it: it asked the right questions, came to the appropriate course of action, told me the correct things, and then did the exact opposite on the backend which then required me to track down an actual human (quickly successfully I might add) to fix it.
But this aligns precisely with what I said. I didn't say it was easy. In fact, I said that the industry vastly underestimates the technical challenge of the problem. My point in mentioning customer service calls was that when we finally are able to generate viable AI (which seems like a long ways out), short and limited interactions will likely be the first inroads. I stand by what I originally said, which was that in comparison to all other human interactions, these are likely the lowest hanging fruit. Not that they are, in absolute terms, low hanging fruit.
If I'm actually chatting or calling support, it's because things have already gone so wrong that I've been compelled to chat or call support. That's already an escalation, and is something that requires human understanding and intervention.
I don't see that the current state of AI is anywhere near being able to do that.
> When we get there, I'll happily deal with the AI. If it doesn't work, then I expect an escalation path - the same way I do with the human support agent.
I understand. If we ever get there, I suspect that I'll have no choice but to deal with an AI. Hopefully there will be some method by which I can just immediately escalate further and talk to a person.
Part of what I want from support is to know that my problem has been heard and understood by a person. If it's an AI, that is just more separation between me and the company I'm having a problem with. It may not be rational, but I want to at least be able to think that some person at the company actually understands my issue, the importance of it, and cares.
No matter how capable and "intelligent", no AI can give me that.
What does AI do if it doesn't have a good answer? How do you know it gave you a good answer? There are no qualities like 'that person sounded a bit useless' or 'sounds like they're reading from a script' or any of those other wonderful interactions we have with poor customer service was can judge with sentiment/intuition. You just get 'the AI answer.'
Big greed co will hire the cheapest employees, and will do exactly the minimum amount of customer service they can get away with, so long as their profits are sustained.
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