There are no human anymore in customer service according to my last interactions with them.
Nowadays if no choice provided by the chatbots fit your problem or the solution given is not satisfying to you the bot just hang up. Unless you are a public person who can shame them on social medias you are better of trying to find someone who works there on linkedin.
If the only "customer support" a company offers is to talk to a chatbot, I think of that as the exact same thing as not having customer support at all, even if the chatbot can be talked into letting me talk to a human.
I loathe the fact that chatbots have not only replaced a lot of human customer support, but that companies have made it almost IMPOSSIBLE to reach critical (human) customer support. It's a fucking travesty, and something companies should be shamed for.
For example - I'm currently having issues with an international shipment. It is unclear if the shipment ever left the country, if it's in limbo - hiding in some warehouse, or what. I went through this a couple of year ago, and back then, the shipping company had their phone numbers available. I got the problem fixed after 30 mins on the phone.
These days? There are no phone numbers to be found. No email. Only the chatbot, which does not yield the desired results.
I ended up searching my email inbox, and luckily found some contact person. Sent said person a mail, and luckily got a phone number and email to the correct department. I'm now awaiting a reply from them.
edit: I think it's fine to have a chatbot on the website, but not at the expense of all other methods.
I was usually able to get through a human operator on the biggest fintech in my country by starting every conversation on their website chatbox with "I want to talk to a human being". Well, last week I had a problem that needed to be solved, and guess what, my "magic" phrase resulted in "human assistants are only available on business days, 9 to 5... the problem is, it was Monday 10AM. And the same happened on Tuesday. And my problem still isn't solved. So I believe they're phasing out the human part of their customer service. And I'll probably be phasing out the customer part of our relationship very soon if these shenaningans persist.
Tons of companies have already replaced their actual support chat with AI bots, it's absolutely annoying when you want to get ahold of someone. Some allow you to just ask to get ahold of a person, others don't allow it or have extremely limited hours.
I’ve found that it’s pretty much impossible to talk to a person in most customer services in the past few years, it’s always a “robot”. And this has been going since well before LLMs.
The issues with customer service have been terrible for a very long time. The introduction of phone IVR menus that have labyrinths to prevent the caller from reaching a real person is also somewhat common with many companies. Then come chatbots, which are universally stupid, totally useless, and a big waste of time (anytime I see a company with a chatbot I think that a CTO doesn't exist or is clueless or just got a nice commission from buying it from a vendor).
There are sites that list phone numbers of companies and provide information on if or how one can reach a human. I'm not associated with this company in any way, but I've heard of it a long time ago and it's still around: https://gethuman.com . I'm sure there are other services that help with shortcuts on reaching a person who can help. In the worst case, do a "Tell HN" here with the name of the company and you'd more likely get a real human helping you out! :|
Reminds me of my experience with Lenovo, They have this chatbot in some cases as their only of contacting their customer care. (Unless you wanna visit offline ig or email, which doesn't have the same urgency) Which makes it awfully annoying to escalate the issue. I had to go through the same prompt every time to get to customer care.
Oh man, absolutely. Recently a lot of large businesses have resorted to walling themselves in behind chatbots, often completely replacing all forms of customer contact except phone support with endless queues. Dutch PostNL: here's looking at you.
Getting people to give up seems to be the main goal, not a side effect.
It has gotten to the point where any contact with a company where someone responds to you in person, clearly answering your question, and where contacting them was as easy as clicking on an email link feels so rare and special.
I believe this. Lots of the companies I deal with in the context of them screwing up service provision have a AI chatbot as the only point of contact. I change provider when I encounter this but it is really difficult to determine ahead of time which companies still have a customer service.
Shout out to "Fully", the standing desk people, for having an extremely efficient automated pipeline for posting you things and delegating customer service to credit card chargebacks.
The irony is that chatbots and automated phone support dont function like this — instead, they amplify anger. By the time you actually get to a human, you’re not just frustrated with the original issue, but the massive (and often bigger) pain of dealing with the terrible automated support system.
When I use these chatbots or contact customer support, it's probably because I need a very basic and simple thing done.
Not because I don't want to do it myself. Because the website I'm using is throwing error messages, the form to do it myself has disappeared five years ago, and the only way to accomplish what I want is to bother someone over the phone.
When I worked customer service, I'm sure customers could've done most of the things they wanted to do themselves, if the website wasn't unclear, the help articles weren't incomplete and outdated, the manuals were up to date and the necessary buttons were accessible to the end user.
Companies sabotage themselves with shitty business practices so their cheap support lines get overwhelmed. Almost everything I've wanted to get done through a chatbot should've been an HTML form in my account panel, but businesses don't want to make it easy to return things or ask for refunds. They want you to jump through as many hoops and redirections as possible, because that makes them money.
With the way ChatGPT just lies and deceives out of the box, I've started taking screenshots of chatbot conversations. These businesses are making these chatbots their official point of contact so I take everything these bots promise to do or claim to have done as an official statement from their support department.
I dont want useless customer support.
Wether that's a human or a bot.
It's extremely frustrating to have a real issue, take for instance a plane cancelled or delayed when travelling with kids, and not being able to talk to a real person who can actually help. Let alone having to wait 30-60 minutes to get a hold of someone.
Nowadays most large organisations are structured now that it's impossible to have a conversation with a human who actually has the power to make a decision. All they repeat is info that's found online and tell you to fill in a form or email.
In that case a chatbot is probably better for both sides, mainly for the person behind the phone who doesn't get verbally abused on a regular basis.
Sadly best way to get helped by corps nowadays is to tweet to them.
I'd have a problem with both in the support case. The alternative to a human contact is a natural language interface that just wastes my time and/or laziness in other parts of the business. If my problem is covered by your FAQ, improve search. If my problem can be solved by a bot, let me do it in your UI. If handling my problem through a human requires more information prepend a form. Provide a clear path to skip/escalate.
To be fair though, I'm annoyed by human first level support for similar reasons most of the time but at least escalation/problem solving with them is easier than a bot that explodes when you go off-script. I think, personally, that making me talk to your fancy answering machine is just devalueing. If a company wants my business they should have human support and pay them enough to work with the customer.
I had an interesting experience with an AI support call a few days ago (not with Amazon). The LLM was being unhelpful and completely failing to understand what my problem was. Eventually, I resorted to just repeating "I want to talk to a human", which would result in a response like (paraphrasing) "I understand that you want to speak with a human, but tough.".
Eventually I lost patience completely and said "I just want to talk to a fucking human". At which point the AI's speaking tone changed completely and became very curt.
It didn't get me the needed support (I never got support and will no longer do any business with that company), but I found it pretty hilarious.
I had an issue yesterday where Comcast forced me to go through their chatbot before I could speak to a human. That drove me crazy, because what I wanted to do I couldn't do on their website at all.
There needs to be some kind of escape hatch where you can get through to a real person. Companies that do stuff like this just make me want to stop dealing with them altogether.
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