Wait until generative AI tells a customer to touch electricity.
Or that they can buy the plane ticket first, then apply for the grievance discount later…
https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2024/02/18/air-canada-airline-chatbot-ruling/
An Air Canada spokesperson said in a statement to The Washington Post that the airline will comply with the tribunal’s decision.
The most shocking part
Pretty sure a court told them to.
Usually the next step is “nuh-uh” followed by an appeal.
Someone with an expensive calculator probably worked out that it would be more expensive to fight this and just allow it.
Someone expensive with a calculator
The rare sort of Engineer who took classes in Finance and Statistical Analytics who can work out a past-present-future cash flow diagram on a whiteboard in like 5min because he never uses the compound interest factor tables and instead memorized the formulas.
Idk— Tesla directed autopilot to disengage the moment before a crash, to ensure that the driver was held responsible. I sadly doubt any corpo would pay for its mistake
Call centres exist because people can’t get the help they need by searching. Take away call centres, and you’re just making it more difficult for customers.
Uhh they’ve all been outsourced to India for ages now, and they’re effectively useless. You’ll get someone who’s worse than an AI at understanding what you’re asking and cannot deviate from a scrip because they have no training.
I haven’t used one in over a decade, if I have an issue it’s going as an email or a comment on social media.
Can’t even describe how shitty meta support is. I ordered a quest 3 and some additionals, they mailed me everything except the quest and something else I didn’t order. Obvious mix-up, yeah? Well it took 4 different support chats and 6 different “specialists” over a month to actually process a refund, and they were still somehow stuck on the idea that the courier missed a box. An additional box under the same tracking number as another box that was labeled 1 of 1.
Never, and I repeat NEVER, buy directly from most manufacturers. For whatever reason, their customer service on the consumer purchase side always seems to suck. Buy from authorized resellers who care more about the relationship with their customers.
Did… my dad the used car salesman write this? Your post sounds plausible, but… sorry, NO ONE cares about relationships with customers. Every last company is enshittifiable & thus inherently untrustworthy
I have experience on the reseller side of the electronics business. I will tell you that most big resellers (Amazon, Walmart, Best Buy, etc) will do more in situations like this than the actual companies themselves. I’ve seen it a lot. Sure, it’s anecdotal evidence, but I’ve also read a ton of complaints over the years on Reddit of similar situations.
These first party manufacturers are manufacturers first and retail shops second (or third) so they put less effort on that side.
Cool
This has been my experience whenever I’ve phoned support.
We’re experiencing extremely high call volume.
Every hour of every day, because company won’t hire or pay for anything better.
Press 3 to have a representative call you back; You won’t lose your place in line.
Sure. Meanwhile, I get on their website and try their weird “chat” support popup, that somehow takes care of the problem hours before I ever get a call back.
This is why people hate phone support. And why I don’t trust and won’t buy products from companies who only have phone support (or “social media”, Facebook, Twixer). Give me a dedicated support email address, or something text-based (live chat, contact form) on website, thanks!
Weird. I’m only looking for phone support when there is no online support, or it doesn’t help, or can’t understand the problem, or there’s no keywords that put it in the right area, or for whatever reason is too “smart” so doesn’t work on iPhone. I don’t trust companies that don’t have call support, because they are more blatantly not supporting their products
Chat>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>phone
> makes a series of confident critical statements
> hasn’t used one in over a decade
You’re right, they’re totally un-outsourcing call centres and India is no longer a hotspot of outsourced call centres.
Gee golly I really need to use them to know that nothing has changed! Not at all like I can hear it everywhere from everyone else.
Fucking muppet.
How you react to information that challenges your assumptions is a very good indicator of your ability to contribute to society in general.
https://liveops.com/contact-center-industry/companies-onshoring-customer-service/
https://www.cio.com/article/238869/why-outsourced-call-center-roles-are-coming-back-onshore.html
Wow you found a few companies bringing a few roles back, that clearly highlights the current state of the entire industry!
Hey look I can do that too!
&tc.
Fucking muppet.
Do you understand that providing some examples of the opposite doesn’t show “all”? Your goal is supposed to be proving the examples I gave wrong, not adding new examples, because I’m not the one that said “all”. So what we’ve learned today is that different companies are doing different things and that blanket uninformed statements don’t contribute to anything. Cool. You good?
Oh and if you want to use the ampersand for etc you don’t need the t. Ampersand is “e” and “t” together! I hope I’ve helped whatever goal you had in choosing to write “&tc”.
My goal is to show that anyone can post links to news articles.
Unless you’re going to post some in-depth pubmed study or other reputable source of knowledge that shows categorically that the new norm is companies no longer outsourcing their call centres in favour of domestic ones - I will continue to think the default action these days is, as it has been for the past 2 decades now, outsourcing to cheap labour.
I don’t need to engage with them to know nothing has changed in this regard. Capitalism prides itself on seeking the lowest cost option at the expense of the consumer.
I didn’t know who to side with but you’ve switched to a deceptive argument so I’m not giving you thy benefit of thy doubt anymore.
It’s very clear he’s using common English usage of all to mean significant majority, pretending not to understand this and trying to win on semantics makes it seem like you’re an untrustworthy orator.
This is the one place there’s still hope: an ai could follow a much larger script, and even be helpful. It’s possible
Since when has that stopped any corporation from doing anything?
Unless you are an absolute monopoly, there is a point you can cross where your customers just leave.
No worries then, Absolute monopolies only exist in text books.
We handle support in our company as part of our day to day. By and large the bulk of support is people simply leaning on us, rather than relying on common sense, or using the docs. Only a small percent is what would be considered essential.
However, each industry is different. This is just ours.
Generative AI could easily help the bulk of our support load.
We’re experimenting with retrieval augmented generation for early inquiries right now. We get hundreds of inquiries that could be answered by looking at the website/docs and Q&A models with extractive or abstract approaches, or newer generative approaches are good at handling them.
Looked at four models last week, 2 vendors and 2 open source solutions, it’s very promising. Very high accuracy with extractive approaches to simple queries, an email answering bot that links to our live website, along with an offer to talk to a real person could help us out a lot.
You’d be surprised how often we can automate a customers enquiry with ML (not even generative AI). Humans are still there as a fallback, but it’s a way better experience to give instant help to the person if possible and then put them into the queue if they have a more complicated problem. Searching is not really in the same context as automating customer queries, although I guess it could depend on the domain to an extent.
Are you using a self hosted open source system, or a saas subscription? I’m genuinely interested.
We use a home grown classification model for our customer facing stuff. There are some applications of LLMs we are using a SaaS for as it’s quick to get going but we are also working on fine tuning an open source model as well so we’ll see what ends up working better in terms of cost vs performance. That’s not going to be customer facing though, we don’t serve any generated text to customers.
If a request is simple and common enough that the request can be automated, then it is most likely something that I’m already pissed off about having to call in about since it should have been a feature on the company’s website.
Yes but how often do you call? People like us make up like 1% of their calls, 90% come from people asking ‘how do I download the Google?’ or ‘I saved a picture of my cat where did it go?’ and 9% is people with general questions they could have found online but they didn’t want to get into it.
Hahahahaha
Oh, you were serious?
Yes this is literally my job dude but go ahead and tell me how wrong I am
Oh, I’ve been called by my cell operator today. Realized it’s a bot when it offered to upgrade my plan because I’ve used more than half of it. It’s 28th of this month FFS! I asked whether that’s what they mean and why would I need that, it just repeated in the same voice.
I always love how they make you go through a labrinythian menu before you get to a human as if I hadn’t already exhausted all options to help myself.
Imaking it more difficult is what I am 100% certain that’s what most companies I’ve had to deal with are trying to do. They will love this.
Remember back in the early days of the internet, when FAQs had frequently asked questions, and were updated in response to calls? Pepperidge farms remembers.
Mobile link that shows alt text:
Holy shit yes please.
We should instead be using AI to decimate the CEO industry.
Well, the world is your oyster… Can’t wait for yout chief automated officer.
edit: There was a similar hype back in the blockchain era, where people were trying to build decentralized organizations by making all the shareholders directly vote on every decision. Let’s just say this model wasn’t especially successful except for very rare circumstances.
AI: what do you need
Me: Talk to a human
AI: okay, so I can help get the right help what specifically do you need?
Me: to talk to a human
ad infinitum
Me: divide by 0
Ai: OK you are the new CEO. Which sales slates would you like to run next week?
I think they should start with decimating the CEO industry
But we’re supposed to be training AI to be smarter, not dumber.
I work for the largest contact center tech firm, and I’m sure it won’t be this year. There are major issues to be solved. The companies that acted first had cars sold for $1, entirely new offers made up that they had to honor, and their bots made poems full of swear words about how shitty their companies were. I’m not sure how long it will take for gen ai to take over but some major issues need to be solved first and I don’t see much progress being made on those.
Ahh, laziness, impatience, and hubris! This is hilarious (“if true”, obv) & 100% unsurprising
Extremely ironical that they used an AI generated pie chart in the article that couldn’t even distinguish the colours between choices
I think that was probably a conscious decision made to differentiate between agree and non-agree votes.
As a colorblind person … this is a teachable moment for what we go through with all kinds of charts and video games lol
(and yes, it’s this bad, and yes it happens A LOT)
Will the AI not hang up on me when I ask it a question that’s going to take a long time to resolve and fuck up it’s service metrics?
I’ve gone through like 3 service reps in a single problem because the call mysteriously drops after I outline the issue. “Could you hold please?” — click
I promise you 1) this real-world event will fail to be scrubbed from the training data & 2) it will be regurgitated as a valid event that saves the company money.
So yes. That will happen again :/
Dammit, you probably aren’t wrong…
We’re doomed.
Dammit, you probably aren’t wrong either.
There are already stories about companies being sued because their AI gave advice that caused the customer to act in a manner detrimental to themselves. (Something about 'plane flight refunds being available if I remember correctly).
Then when they contacted the company to complain (perhaps get the promised refund), they were told that there was no such policy at their company. The customer had screenshots. The AI had wholesale hallucinated a policy.
We all know how this is going to go. AI left, right and centre until it costs companies more in AI hallucination lawsuits than it does to employ people to do it.
And all the while they’ll be
bribinglobbying government representatives to make AI hallucination lawsuits not a thing. Or less of a thing.On the other hand, are you implying that human call center workers are accurate with what they tell customers and that when they make mistakes the companies will own up to them and honor them?
I mean that’s generally how it is now. If a rep lied to me then you better believe I’m talking to the manager and going to extract some concession. The difference is you can hold a rep accountable, dunno how you do that with AI
I will not be shedding a tear if people no longer have to work in such a soul crushing menial job. Fuck around and findout what happens millions of people lose their jobs all at once.
but anyway this is just some more ai hype stock manipulation shit.
First of all, it will make cold calling way, way worse. Time to ramp up restrictions, fines and other penalties for that kind of stuff.
When it comes to tech support call centers, some may actually improve. Not because the technology is so superior, but just because the current support simply sucks, and any change would be an improvement. And then they must actually work, i.e. solve the customers problems. On top of that, there is that case where an AI call center made expensive promises (IIRC if promised a car for $1 or something like that), and the judge made the company uphold this deal.
It’s a soul destroying job anyway.
At least we’ve all got reasonable unemployment measures to make sure these people are able to transition to better work.
If by “Decimate” you mean “Reduce by a tenth” then it’s already happened.
Once I learned the meaning of decimate It really grates seeing it used as a synonym for “wipes out”
Oh, I thought it meant “divided by ten”?
It refers to a punishment for bad performance in ancient Roman armies: 1 in ten soldiers was killed.
nah
If only the word decimate could be used correctly…
I’ve explained that it means “reduce by 10%” once, got a long rant that in the modern language it means what people mean when using it. Linguistically correct, but heresy.
It’s a real dilemma.
