Comment by blackhaz

Comment by blackhaz 3 days ago

Sure. First line tech support as well. In many situations customers will get vastly superior service if AI agent answers the call.

At least in my personal case, struggling with renewal at Virgin Broadband, multiple humans wasted probably an hour of everyone's time overall on the phone bouncing me around departments, unable to comprehend my request, trying to upsell and pitch irrelevant services, applying contextually inappropriate talking scripts while never approaching what I was asking them in the first place. Giving up on those brainless meat bags and engaging with their chat bot, I was able to resolve what I needed in 10 minutes.

kamaal 3 days ago

Its strange you have to write this.

In India most of the banks now have apps that do nearly all the banking you can do by visiting a branch personally. To that extent this future is already here.

When I had to close my loan and had to visit a branch nearly a few times, the manager tells me, significant portion of his people's time now goes into actual banking- which according to him was selling products(fixed deposits, insurances, credit cards) and not customer support(which the bank thinks is not its job and has to because there is no other alternative to it currently).

Reply View 0 replies

firesteelrain 3 days ago

> Sure. First line tech support as well. In many situations customers will get vastly superior service if AI agent answers the call.

In IT, if at a minimum, AI would triage the problem intelligently (and not sound like a bot while doing it), that would save my more expensive engineers a lot more time.

Reply View 0 replies

supriyo-biswas 3 days ago

This is mostly because CS folks are given such sales and retention targets; and while I’ve never encountered a helpful support bot even in the age of LLMs, I presume in your case the company management was just happy to have a support bot talking to people without said metrics.

Reply View 0 replies

Xunjin 3 days ago

“brainless meat bags” have you ever thought they are instructed to do so to achieve product selling quotas?

Reply View 3 replies

wkat4242 3 days ago

Anyone who blindly follows orders is a brainless meat bag too.

Reply View | 2 replies
- Xunjin 3 days ago
  
  Again, you assume those people have choice, you definitely should search more how people on these jobs are pressured to reach quotas and are abused in many ways. A simple search on Reddit you can see plenty of reports about it:
  https://www.reddit.com/r/callcentres/comments/1iiqbxh/the_re...
  Abuses done by customers: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-59577351
  
  Reply View | 1 reply
  
  wkat4242 3 days ago
  
  You always have a choice. These people aren't forced to work there. And they also have the ability to go whistleblower and leak internal docs that instruct them to abuse customers. Just as an example.
  I know I would. If someone gives you a choice A or B that both screw you over, there's always an option Z somewhere. It might be so outrageous they don't expect it but it's there.
  However usually it isn't necessary. I've been put in situations where I had to do something unethical. I've refused. And every time that choice was respected. Only if I'd have been punished for it would I have considered more severe options like the whistle option.
  But really if you take a hard stand and have good reasons, reality tends to bend a bit further than I expected.
  And yes I know what these jobs are like. I have worked in that industry a long time. I've seen both very good and very terrible employers.
  And yeah customers can also be little shits but I've learned to disconnect from that very quickly. It's easier when they're on the other side of the phone. It doesn't help them anyway. And sometimes (especially if they're not just a dick but they have a genuine reason to be angry) there's ways to flip them around, in which case that energy might be harnessed and they can become your strongest ally. Another thing I've seen that I didn't expect.
  
  Reply View | 0 replies