The general trend of insulating the human customer away from human customer service is just a horrible thing that keeps spreading. It was bad enough outsourcing customer support to overseas agents who have their hands tied to only read from a script and generally do nothing, and now we're just talking to computers that can generally do nothing. The message is the same: we don't actually care about our customers.
I own a small business and I would rather shut my doors than force my paying customers through AI cattle gates to struggle for help. I can understand that providing customer support on a massive scale is hard, but it is arguably the MOST important part of the customer experience, maybe even more so than the product itself. It seems incomprehensibly short-sighted to abstract it away in the name of short-term profits.
I think your opinion stems from never having dealt with normal people interfacing with a technical product. They're not asking the same questions you or I might, they're asking documented questions and they're doing it in obscene volume, with such little ability to help themselves.
ISPs probably take the cup for worst ratio of technical issues to technical idiots. It's not just a modem, there's a line, an internal network and a really bothersome user all working against optimal service.
Your desire to handle that all in-house by organic, corn-fed, English-as-their-first-language meat-bags is lovely but you'd be bankrupt in a week.
This isn't new. We've had customer service levels for decades. What happened before is you talked to non-technical staff following scripts before escalation. Then that model pushed those staff overseas. Now the lowest rung is a LLM. The trick they have to re-learn when to let the user tell you to step back and fetch a real person. That, and getting the tone of the LLM to not declare everything as if that'll definitely fix the problem.
>Your desire to handle that all in-house by organic, corn-fed, English-as-their-first-language meat-bags is lovely but you'd be bankrupt in a week.
This sentiment is, in essence, the problem. It's perfectly logical for this trend of distancing customers from their , as you put it, "all in-house by organic, corn-fed, English-as-their-first-language-meat-bags" when you start with the core concept that the _only_ purpose of a company is to earn capital.
Look at the profit margin for some given company. And you need to look at the profit, not the revenue they get from you.
Many of the companies you are asking to provide service are making a buck or two a month from you, even if you are nominally paying hundreds of dollars. So if you call up a real human, you can be draining away months, years, even the entire profit margin you will ever be worth, pretty quickly. Especially if you want to be talking to someone making more than the US minimum wage.
You don't need the principle that "the only purpose of a company is to earn capital". All you need to explain the current situation is "a company can not survive if expenses exceed income". You can't have customers costing you more than they pay you and make it up in volume. So consumers are basically just boned; they will not and even can not pay enough to get good support for most of the things they buy. Not in theory, not in fact.
I know places that provide very good support. But they are places where the profit margin on a customer is well sufficient to pay for a support person's amortized time, and losing the customer still hurts the bottom line, even after a support call or three, because even three extended support calls that resulted in consults straight to engineering still weren't anywhere near enough to cancel the profit margin.
I think ISPs are actually a great counter-example to your point. The major ISPs are not dominant because they are the only ones able to stay profitable given the tight margins.
There are several examples of local, for profit, ISPs that are about to provide a better service, at a lower cost, and with better customer service. The major ISPs have not responded to this by truly outcompeting these challengers, but by weaponizing the legal system to shut these competitors down.
So, while I agree that "a company can not survive if expenses exceed income", I disagree with your premise that you cannot provide decent customer service within the profit margins of these businesses.
This is an interesting thought, assuming a call center employee is paid $35k, total cost of employment being $70k, you could hire 14.25 employees for every million dollars.
If every Concast exec got paid a paltry $5M (lowest paid exec salary), they’d be able to hire around 975 more CS reps.
They have 13.6 million subscribers, so they’d increase the number of support reps by 0.000071691176471 per customer.
My thought was maybe they could reduce their marketing budget but it seems their business has shrunken by ~50% in the past 10 years.
Most people who just knee-jerk that the problem is excessive executive pay have not worked the math. This math is typical of all the businesses I've ever worked the math for. It may sound good to say "take all the executive pay" and "turn it into customer support"/"pay it to all the employees"/"drop the price of the service"/etc., but if you actually work the math typically it turns out you're trying to put out a forest fire with a cup of water. Such high pay may be problems for other reasons but it is not the root problem for very many large companies, if it is for any.
> core concept that the _only_ purpose of a company is to earn capital.
There seems to be an inverse relationship between size of company and quality of service. The bigger the company I suspect that great service is not as likely to lead to a positive gain for the company - especially at near monopoly scale. A new sale has little value to the monopoly, while a new sale for the small biz might put payroll over the top for next pay period.
> the core concept that the _only_ purpose of a company is to earn capital.
Companies or organizations in general, won't survive if their costs are too high.
There is nothing prescriptive about it.
It is a merely a description of market dynamics.
You can have whatever value system you wants and you can burn money doing whatever you want, but a value system doesn't change the reality of market dynamics.
And no amount of blaming all problems on nebulous ideas like "capitalism" changes that either.
You can either recognize reality or enjoy bankruptcy. Your choice!
It's not fair to think about this just in terms of capitalism. Even non-profits and charities have customer support systems. A customer who cannot or will not help themselves costs that organisation more to service than one who will. This is pretty universal.
If an automated system can handle 50% of the calls quickly and accurately, you're getting better value for your other user, who might be paying for the organisation's running fees.
It's only when it grates like this, when you're screaming "CONNECT ME TO A HUMAN!!1" at an AI where it's really a problem.
Capitalism operates in a finite world with a brittle biological network that serves as a fundamental condition for sustaining life further, including capitalists agents.
It doesn’t mean capitalist overlords consider this vision as a perspective that should condition every moves they make, on the contrary it’s often like fully embracing unlimitism and echosystem mass destruction is the must have attitude.
That is, people are not absolutely bound to forge opinions and act in a way that matches the social norm of the day.
While hegemonic anthropological systems are hard to ignore for those living in their sphere of influence, it doesn’t mean every single human endorse wholly its axiological mindset.
Consider Jean Meslier the French Catholic priest who was discovered, upon his death in 1729, to have written a book-length philosophical essay promoting atheism and materialism.
Being embedded in a system has nothing to do with with being intimately akin with this system.
> when you start with the core concept that the _only_ purpose of a company is to earn capital.
...Yes? That's literally what a corporation is for. That some might have good customer service is simply a marketing method to get people to continue using that company to, in the end, earn capital. If you want to run a service whose primary motive is not earning capital, create a non profit.
No, it's not, or at least, it doesn't have to be, and it wasn't always. It's amazing how our modern society has so completely lionized and internalized greed.
Maybe the core concept of a corporation could be, for example:
- to make an excellent product in a sustainable manner,
- to provide gainful employment,
- to steward a natural resource,
- to push the boundaries of human knowledge,
- to organize a portion of society,
- etc.
I'm sure I could go on, this is literally 3 minutes of thought so far.
All of these could be pursued as the primary purpose of the corporation, with a goal of doing so profitably as a secondary concern. None of these are fundamentally incompatible with seeking profits. And in fact, in the past, as part of incorporation, you had to create a charter: what was the purpose of your corporation? That's actually still part of the prices if you go to register a business, though I don't know how meaningful it is anymore. Even the doctrine that corporations be managed "for the benefit of the shareholders," does not necessarily imply a focus on earning capital above all else.
But when the idea that profits are the sole and highest aim of a business, then yes, a lot of very good things get lost along the way.
This is already s long comment, so I'll stop here. I'm not convinced that the way we've chosen in 2024 to conceptualize corporations, even capitalism, is the only way. I think this statement:
> [Earning capital is] literally what a corporation is for
Not sure what you mean "it wasn't always," because it literally started off as a way to divide trade proceeds, you could buy shares in an entity that entitled you to shares of the profits. Again, you could just as easily start a non-profit to achieve all of those things, corporations have always been for earning capital as their primary motive, it's not a value judgment, it's simply the definition of a corporation. It is actually you who is making a value judgment, that corporations should do X, Y, and Z unrelated to earning capital as a primary objective.
At this point we're going to need to provide sources if we want to get further value out of this discussion because I disagree with your definition and don't believe your characterization of the history of incorporation. Profit sharing and ownership interest have always been a motivating aspect of incorporation, yes, but historically the main goal of the corporation has not been earning capital as their primary motive. The first US corporations, for example, where chartered by the government with specific goals in mind. The question of scope/goal is still part of the incorporation process. If the purpose of all corporations was profit, by definition, why ask? I that is vestigial: we used to care more about the charter and goal because profit was a concern, but not the primary concern.
I'm also intentionally not making a value judgement on what a corporation should do, rather pointing out that there exist many possibilities beyond a pure profit motive.
My dad's ISP did exactly what you say is impossible. It was a small ISP in Salt Lake City (xmission, if anyone cares). They had actual humans answering the phone, and no bankruptcies.
Most of the companies I've worked for have been the same, and my personal companies as well. The financial reality that I've experienced is that customer service is a very expensive, and it doesn't take long for a call to use up your profit margin.
But good customer service pays dividends in the long run even if it appears to be a loss in the short. In cold money terms, it's not an expense, it's an investment.
I worked for a small ISP in the mid 90's and we did the same. The only reason this worked is because back then, barely anyone was online. And many of the people who were online were technically sophisticated early adopters that needed less support. Today's world is very different.
Imagine something like a credit score but for technological adeptness. A high score and you can reliably get an on prem human and even sometimes an engineer. A low score and you just get endless bots. Average and you get the current system.
> Your desire to handle that all in-house by organic, corn-fed, English-as-their-first-language meat-bags is lovely but you'd be bankrupt in a week.
Nah, the C-suite fat cats just need to take a few million less for running a shitty business, and use the money to hire people who actually have to do stuff for customers.
If the first contact I can have with support is an LLM, that's the same as not providing support. Even talking to non-technical staff following scripts first, as obnoxious as that is, is preferable.
The only reason that I'm calling support in the first place is because web searching and their automated systems have failed me.
I may not be the standard customer, but that's not my problem. If that matters, all that's saying is that the company doesn't want me as a customer.
No it actually can be done competently, believe it or not. The best example of this I've seen is Swisscom. Swisscom has a customer support bot, they call it "Sam". Sam is amazing and a lesson to all other companies in how to automate customer support.
1. Sam tells you it's a bot. They don't hide what they're doing.
2. Sam is optional. You can choose to call human support at any time.
3. If you agree to always try chatting to Sam first they cut you in on the savings, and reduce your monthly bill. The reduction is big enough to be definitely worth it, it's not 10 cents a month or anything like that.
4. Sam escalates quickly and voluntarily if it can't work out how to answer your question. It doesn't try and block you from talking with a person.
5. Sam is astonishingly good at actually answering questions. I don't know what tech they're using for this; it seems like some sort of really souped up LLM with great RAG, maybe. Whatever it is, it works. Several times I've contacted Swisscom support and gone through Sam, and it did in fact solve my problem.
6. All the above is true even though I'm interacting with Sam in English, which is not a Swiss national language.
Truly, this is what a good bot-supported contact experience should be like. Of course in most cases institutions don't do such a good job, and just become frustrating. Bots that pretend to be human, bots that don't seem to know the answers to anything, bots that make it as hard as possible to escalate and of course in the end ... nothing in it for the customer to put up with that. But if Swisscom can do it then other companies can too, there's nothing magical about this use case.
My assumption is that after a while we're going to find that most people actually prefer bot driven support experiences, same as how they came to prefer self checkout at supermarkets, ATMs at banks etc.
> Your desire to handle that all in-house by organic, corn-fed, English-as-their-first-language meat-bags is lovely but you'd be bankrupt in a week.
Or, the ISP/shareholders would have to accept slightly lower profits. I know, I know, this is totally unspeakable here, but might as well at least list the option for completeness.
You aren't getting it. The difference isn't between "high profits" and "slightly lower profits". For most businesses it's between small profits and large losses.
Why are you quoting a revenue figure but talking about profits?
AT&T has a profit margin currently of about 11%, which is around the average profit margin across all industries. It isn't a particularly profitable business. Not the worst, but also far from the best. In a company like that profitability can be very volatile. Small changes in the per-user cost can wipe out all profits overnight, which is why it's common for companies with billions in revenue to suddenly flip from net profit to net loss. That happened to AT&T in Q4 2022 when they went from a +17% margin to -7% in the space of a single quarter. They didn't start making profits again until a year later.
>The general trend of insulating the human customer away from human customer service is just a horrible thing that keeps spreading.
A law is being debated in my EU country where companies can't put customers on hold more than 10 minutes before reaching an actual human for support. I hope it passes and that it spreads across the union and also applies to tech companies as well.
That's going to be spicy - things like product launches often have 100-1000x the call volume than a typical day, so training up 100x workers temporarily is going to suck - I used to train apple's tech support.
I prefer that feature massively. Being on hold sucks, you can't fully commit to doing another task because you need to listen out for the fuzzy elevator music to switch to a human voice. Even worse when the fuzzy music switches to a recorded human voice every 30 seconds to remind you you're still on hold.
Having a call back means I can forget about it and go on with my day until they call me.
...I wonder if there's a meaningful way to prevent companies from saying they're going to do this, and then just "losing" 80% of the callbacks they're supposed to give. Or giving them at 1AM (hey, it's 10:30AM in Mumbai where the off-hours call center is!).
Waiting for a callback is unquestionably way better than waiting on hold, but I would still need to make sure I'm in a position to be taking that call and actually handling whatever it requires at any given time during the waiting period, so things like going shopping or being in a place with poor cell signal (like my office!) aren't good options—and what happens if I'm not available the moment they call? Can they just say "oh, well, couldn't reach customer" and force me to start the process again?
> Already feels like they can work around that by having the "Don't wait on hold, we'll call you back when an agent is ready" feature.
I tried this recently with an airline (AA). The next callback time was like 10 hours later. A bit crazy but ok I took it.
When the time came I get a call. From an agent? Nope. From the same automated system which cheerfully announced this was my callback, now please wait for the next available agent! After being on hold for 10+ minutes I gave up.
If you are selling ANY product, customer experience is part of what you are selling. Apple gets this better than practically anyone else.
BUT, as a small business owner you are forced to make decisions about where to allocate your limited resources. In your case (and in mine) customer service likely created word of mouth referrals, retained customers, and future expansion opportunities.
I guarantee you that there are many businesses where folks somehow think customer service is merely a cost center to be eliminated. For the folks who are already in that boat, AI arguably will likely be better than their outsourced callcenters.
When will they swing back to seeing the bigger picture, and realize their business is only as valuable as the customer relationships they build?
It's rather simple. If you don't pay enough money for a product that would sustain good customer service, you won't get it. Especially if you pay nothing and the product business model is ad-based.
If you pay enough money, you usually can get good customer service, but you might pay a lot.
In my experience, paying a high price is no guarantee you'll get particularly good customer service.
Obviously, it is often the case that you can pay more and get better service.
But at the same time, the $300 seats at the theatre and the $40 seats get exactly the same treatment from the ushers. The premium airlines lose bags just as often as the economy airlines - maybe moreso, with their large highly automated hub airports. The business class bags get lost just as often as the economy class bags. The low-volume, high end luxury car will be in the shop more often than the mass produced car. The PC vendor can't help with your Linux screen tearing, whether it's a $300 laptop or a $6000 workstation. Sports events with the highest demand will have the most expensive tickets - and also the most queues, the worst toilets, and the most expensive food.
I find getting good customer service far from simple :)
It obviously depends on the category of the "thing" we're talking about - and you can only compare it ceteris paribus with other things.
>But at the same time, the $300 seats at the theatre and the $40 seats get exactly the same treatment from the ushers. The premium airlines lose bags just as often as the economy airlines - maybe moreso, with their large highly automated hub airports.
But the premium seats at the airplane have better treatment than economy ones.
If you buy a premium seat with free food and lounge access, you'll get free food and lounge access, yes. As I mentioned, it is often the case that you can pay more and get better service in that sense.
But when something goes wrong - like they lose your bag - you'll find the customer service is pretty much the same. Possibly there's an ultra-ultra-premium tier where things are different?
The real way money makes travel easier, in my experience, isn't that you can buy flights where they don't lose your bags - it's that a few hundred bucks to replace some lost clothes is a trivial matter.
High uptime and support availability costs a lot. Something the general internet population doesn't think about when comparing prices with municipal broadband.
Their consumer wireline business is mostly regulated and has strict margin caps.
Do you have a source that contradicts the number I provided? Because AT&T is getting wrecked right now by every publicly available number which contradicts both the spirit of your comment and explains why they might cut costs for customer support.
Their business wire line just wrote down nearly half of their previous year numbers.
By no metric I know of does AT&T have a high margin business
By being cheaper for cheap customers by having razor thin margins and they don't complain since it is cheap.
More expensive customers then turn into pure profit but have a hard time going to a competitor who can't undercut you without the scale benefits you got from your cheap offering.
Also massive tax breaks due to "bringing internet to the masses" which your competitors can't get.
The problem is that it enables products of such low quality they arguably should not exist in that form. Try reporting something scammy or harmful on Facebook. The report will be ignored because it would take away too much profit. (Too much for what? We don't know. Maybe FB could not exist in its current form if there was not-horrible "customer" service. Well, maybe it should be a little different then.)
A prime example: you can get systematically harassed by nation state actors (in practice Russian trolls) and their useful idiots, and big tech will do absolutely nothing even after documenting and reporting all of it.
> If you don't pay enough money for a product that would sustain good customer service, you won't get it.
If you do pay enough money for a product that can sustain good customer service, you won't necessarily get it then, either.
>If you pay enough money, you usually can get good customer service, but you might pay a lot.
That "usually" doesn't kick in until you have a sales rep that is worried about loosing your business specifically. Then they'll exercise soft power to escalate your tickets. Because despite their profit margin, their customer service team is still under pressure to cut costs as much as possible.
Agreed. Consider how much you pay monthly for the service. Then consider how much
time would a customer support agent have to spend to help you out and how much money it would cost. To time spent, add in training time, training costs and to always have 100% capacity, the downtime costs as well.
Humans cost a lot.
And if you want creative, passionate humans who would be willing to go off script, you'd have to pay them a lot more, and likely they wouldn't last long at this job even then.
The obvious solution though is to fix the product/service so people don't have to talk to customer support (pit of success, yada yada). This is an iterative process and requires people who form a cross-functional team willing to speak up. I don't see how it is possible in an assembly line kind of environment but for small teams, I am sure it is doable?
> The obvious solution though is to fix the product/service so people don't have to talk to customer support
This is a naive model of why customers call for support that I used to also hold before I had to deal with customers.
I've helped my dad with customer service for a technical product he sells online and there really is nothing you can put in a one-page manual and there's no perfect UI that stops people from calling to waste your time if you make yourself too available.
Though working in Target over a summer was all it took to dispel the myth. Almost every question involved me going (in my head) "Not sure why you need me to do this, but okay, let's read the back of the packaging together so I can answer your question having also never encountered this product in my life."
> The obvious solution though is to fix the product/service
Sure, but that's not really the topic, and without discussing the exact details we wouldn't be able to evaluate how easy it exactly is, because there's always things that could go wrong.
Isn't the issue that even the scripts aren't up to scratch.
A chatbot that had the nuances correctly distinguished would not be a concern but it's because the script is not well put together and most likely poorly applied with a bot that it's so painful.
There's no guarantee that the money you pay will continue to be invested in customer service.
I have worked at a dozen startups, good customer service is an early market requirement, you hire good support staff, give them direct connections to the dev, you make their manager on equal footing.
Once things are humming along and the product isn't such a tire fire, it's "Oh we can promote the good ones to a services department and then export the rest off shore to a company that dgaf"
Were there entirely ad-powered business models with customer facing support before the Internet?
I can think of magazines and radio, but by definition they had localised reach, and there was no actual "users" that might need support, unlike many Internet ad-funded freeware.
> You're ignoring that the support situation has gotten significantly worse the past decade, while the internet existed.
Because much of the Internet has scaled up drastically?
To your example of AliExpress, how many more users do you think they have now compared to a decade ago? How much do you think their support volume has increased? Therefore it's entirely natural that they've looked at avenues of cutting costs.
This is easy to say as a consumer but on the other side of it you’ve got to realize, most people are not like your average HNer. In my experience, customers are unwilling to dedicate even 60 seconds to reading documentation, FAQs, bright blinking banners, etc. The majority of “customer support” is answering questions and solving problems that have extremely simple answers and very obvious and well-documented solutions. It’s not something you want to spend money on, it’s usually worth it to throw an LLM at them and let go the ones that refuse to read. Even on the employee side, no one wants to be on calls all day dealing with people that are intentionally ignorant, it’s rage-inducing.
It's gotten so bad, that I have started to actively look for for products and services with known good customer support. E.g. I switched to an internet provider for SMEs. Costs around 20% more, but has dedicated IPv4/IPv6 IPs and offers a real human help desk.
I am doing the same recently. It took me a while to learn this (because I started life without much access to money). Buying convenience is a thing!
Some examples: I pay for my search (Kagi). I picked my home builder by how they took my wishes into account. Instead of the chain restaurant, with disinterested staff, go to the one where the person behind the counter is the owner.
I think good customer services can be your special sauce when making a business!
I admire your viewpoint but I also find that it's extremely seldom that I need customer support for the majority of services I use. If I need it it's usually because of a flaw with the service. Surely it's very hard to be aware of their flaws if they don't have customer service but if they have other ways to reliable gather that data isn't it better for the customer if the service provider spends that effort fixing the flaws?
People on HN likely lean towards "If I need it it's usually a flaw with the service" more often (particularly regarding technical services) but the vast majority of customer support for the typical company is either "people who think it's a flaw with the service due to a misunderstanding or 3rd party problem" or "people that couldn't figure out how to pay the bill online because they don't use computers much" type things, not necessarily things that can be resolved for everyone in the next push to prod.
The difficulty in well focused support is it's two different sets of problems and the people finding honest to god flaws in your product or service are usually the extreme minority and so not the focus of customer support workflows.
Well, the way it usually goes is that the service provider has no reason at all to fix their flaws if they can just send to the complains into cheap "customer service" instead.
I completely agree that the prioritization of support is woefully lacking, but I think this is a consequence of the shoddy state of support tooling. If customer support professionals were given the right tools to do their jobs, instead of half-baked solutions from 15 years ago, we might see a new virtuous cycle between customers-support-product. That's why my friends and I started Yetto [0], a help desk for people, not cogs.
You can see an overview of the core support workflow in our recorded demo [1], and we have more videos showing off more of the features on the way soon.
Feel free to sign up for access [2] and we'd love to get your feedback on it while we're still in beta. Let me know what you think!
(As a small business owner I am sure you can appreciate the opportunity to pounce on opportunity. )
Customers are generally not willing to pay for trained cs reps that could actually be helpful. As far as startups are concerned VCs would therefore not like you to use their dollars to pay cs reps when an LLM could do the job in their eyes.
I agree with the sentiment of TFA but I think this is a battle that we have no chance of winning at scale. Very similarly to hoping for an ad-free web.
The company I work for has a large, competent and expensive support team. Every single customer state it's their #1 reason they're with us. Yet nobody in the business, investors, or dev teams want to believe it and there's a huge pressure from business to automate, and from the devs to 'do as the other companies do it'. We're building UIs nobody wants to use; our customers would much rather call us, and have us solve their problem in a 1min conversation rather than spend hours figuring it out by themselves. The company is extremely profitable btw
Just recently where I work, we dropped a major supplier of single board computers because their customer service was almost entirely unresponsive the one time we needed their support. We spent a million or two a year with them. Small potatoes in the big picture, but still significant money that is now going to one of their competitors.
That change was a significant cost to us as well, as it meant that the system we were using the boards in had to be redesigned to accommodate a different board.
Yeah, with B2B it's possible at least, since the businesses that pay for your services actually make money. Good customer support can directly and visibility impact their bottom line by reducing hours on debugging and any costs from downtime.
Average people wouldn't be willing to pay enough to provide such level of service.
Average people would switch to a $10/month service instead of $12/month. For internet, mobile plans, people in all sorts of circles brag about what a deal they were able to get with a service provider by haggling. Even when it's a $2 monthly difference. They are proud about their negotiation skills and how they pitted the service providers against each other to make the lowest bid.
Maybe once after they have received unsatisfactory customer support, they would consider switching, but passionate, skilled, caring and creative customer support would cost far, far more than that. Even if you employ enough customer support to provide a human out of the gate for everyone, you would only get people following the same script as the basic chatbot would. People and especially creative people wouldn't stay at this job for long, dealing with entitled customers. In most cases, it's mostly a thankless, dead end job that will get to your mental health.
> customer support would cost far, far more than that
That's not at all a given. Taking the example of $2 more per month, if the average customer needs a support call every two years, they could spend a whole hour on the phone with a support agent making $30/hr and the company is still ahead since they charged an extra $48 over those two years.
An realistically most support calls don't last an hour. Fifteen minutes maybe.
That's why I use Sonic for my ISP for example. I've only used support a few times in over ten years, but when I do, I want to talk to someone who knows what an IP packet is and what Linux is, not someone who just reads from a script telling me to find the start menu and click reboot.
Google has Google One that includes support (including by phone) and Drive/Mail/etc storage. You can literally pay them to get support and other things if you want to.
I don't know how well it's selling, but going off Internet comments here and there, people seem offended they are asked to pay to get support for an otherwise free at the point of use service.
Oh, one has been spectacularly useful to customers, by hallucinating a new, more customer friendly refund policy that courts held the company liable for:
Oh that is just excellent. I love the pathetic excuses they came up with trying to weasel their way out of having to honor promises made by their agents.
> Experts told the Vancouver Sun that Air Canada may have succeeded in avoiding liability in Moffatt's case if its chatbot had warned customers that the information that the chatbot provided may not be accurate.
This is disappointing, though. Can I weasel out of contracts if I say that the information I'm providing may not be accurate before signing?
I remember in the early days of the web people said similar things about online shopping. The LL Bean catalog had more photos in higher resolution than their early e-commerce website, and you would call a phone number and talk to a person who knew the clothing in order to purchase from the catalog. No one would want to buy on a website…
We are in the beginning days here. I expect chatbot advances to similarly start with a lesser customer experience but to eclipse human service in the next decade or so.
In the early days of the web, that is exactly what we did. I was part of a home shopping network, prior to HTTPS being a thing. We were given enough budget to put together a pentium pro, a fractional T1, and coded up a website in C++ that allowed folks to use the same cable TV call center infrastructure. That original 5K generated 200k+ orders.
The general trend is towards customer contact that does not have any agency. At least if you're connected to an AI, you can feel less guilty about hating their guts.
When I was a youngster, you could call a company and a person would answer. They'd ask what you wanted and route you to the appropriate person. It was nice.
You know, then they automated the routing with a menu, what was worse. Then people discovered how to make those menus work, and they became nicer.
Then people discover how to use the menus to make the customers go away, and business segmented into the ones that were nice to use and the ones that would clearly tell you they just want to scam you out of your money.
I'm not sure the problem here is rooted at the LLMs customer service.
> providing customer support on a massive scale is hard
This is a silly myth that these providers want to use as an excuse.
Support has a lot of economy of scale so providing support to a huge user base is a lot cheaper per user than doing so if you only have a few customers.
I own a small business and I would rather shut my doors than force my paying customers through AI cattle gates to struggle for help. I can understand that providing customer support on a massive scale is hard, but it is arguably the MOST important part of the customer experience, maybe even more so than the product itself. It seems incomprehensibly short-sighted to abstract it away in the name of short-term profits.