When I worked at Microsoft, it cost over $20 to have a human customer support agent pick up the phone when someone called in for help. That was greater than our product margin. Every time someone called for help, we basically lost the entire profit on that sale, and then some.
Most common support calls where for things that were explained in the manual, the out of box experience, tutorial documents, FAQ pages, and so on and so forth.
Did we have actual support issues that needed fixing, yes of course. And the insanely high cost of customer support drove us to improve our first use experience. But holy cow people don't realize how expensive support calls are.
Edit: To explain some of the costs - This was back when people worked in physical call centers, so first off we were paying for physical office space. Next up training, each CSR had to be trained on our product. This took time and we had to pay for that training time. We also had to write support material, and update that support material for each new version that came out. All of this gets amortized into the cost of support. Because workers tend not to stay long, you pay for a lot of training.
Add in all the other costs associated with running a call center and the cost per call, even for off shore call centers, is not cheap.
In a reasonable world we'd just raise the price of the product by $x based on what % of people we expect to call in for support (ignore for a minute that estimating that number is hard), but the world isn't reasonable. Downwards price pressure comes from all sides, primarily VC backed competitors who are OK burning $$ to gain market share, and competitors at other FAANGs that are OK burning money to gain market share.
The result is that everyone is going to try and reduce support costs because holy cow per user margins are low now days for huge swaths of product categories (Apple's iPhone being a notable exception...)
My brother used to work at tech support for XBox Live.
He said that 80% of his calls were for password resets, something users can easily self-service. There's literally an option on the login form for "Forgot Password", and people would rather spend time calling up support, waiting on hold, and verifying their identity to a support agent than click a button.
And it's not like the password reset flow was any easier going through support. He'd just trigger a password reset e-mail to be sent, exactly like the user hitting Forgot Password.
And this is after the phone tree tells them "If you forgot your password, click the Forgot Password link".
I always think about this when people demand they should be able to talk to a human. The overwhelming number of callers to tech support don't need a human. Giving everybody the ability to speak to a human just isn't feasible.
I have an uncle that works tech support for XFinity. Half his calls are resolved by just power cycling the modem/router. People shouldn't need a human to tell them to do that.
If they want to reduce support calls, then have more reliable gear.
I'm sympathetic to the argument that companies should make support calls less necessary by providing better products and services, but "just write bug-free software" is not a solution.
- https://www.xfinity.com/learn/internet-service/wifi
- https://www.xfinity.com/support/articles/xfinity-wifi-hotspo...
Just because something appears simple and obvious doesn't mean it is. There's a lot of ways for those systems to fail. Might be the user's connection or might be the server the user is connecting to and the customer support is sending through a different one.
Big lesson I've learned is that if a lot of people are struggling with something that seems obvious then it probably isn't.
Comcast deserves every penny of customer service expenses they're incurring if their own purpose-built modem/routers are so flaky they're responsible for half the problems people experience with their service. Customers should not be expected to endure shitty products without even seeking help from the service provider that owes them better.
By contrast, I've seen Google Fiber proactively issue a partial refund in response to a service outage that was so short I didn't even notice it.
Which, last I knew, were leased-out with their own monthly line-item charge. My own router/modem "paid for itself" very quickly.
"Hi, thank you for your message, please take a look at our following FAQ guides:
- I forgot my password
Was this answer useful to you, or would you like more links to our FAQ? Before we give you a link to what used to be a talk to a human line, but which has been replaced by another chatbot in a sort of Matryoshka"
Surprisingly few of them wanted that. If the AI couldnt handle their issue they mostly wanted customers to just fuck off.
Witness the future of business and society
I doubt it. I suspect the number one tech support call is "I forgot my password" and everything else is a long way below that.
I'll slag on Microslop all day, but users are dumber than dumb.
We product makers get to think about our one little product all day, and it's our job to make our product work for the "dumb" users. It's not their job to adapt to us.
Passwords are the ultimate example of technologists turning in substandard bullshit and then blaming users for “holding it wrong”. If that’s Microsoft’s largest problem, they’ve deserved every call.
This is very different from "I didn't read the instructions on the screen and now I'm calling support". Both scenarios exist. I have some sympathy for businesses facing the latter, and much less for businesses facing the former.
When people talk about wanting "free support", they mean that they want support included with the price of the product (no extra charges), but you're still going to get what you paid for, and expecting too much might not get you what you want.
If you pay $20/month for a software subscription for your small business, you're going to get a different kind of support than the enterprise customer paying $100k/month. The small business customer will get support via email with multi-day SLAs, and the enterprise customer will get priority support via screen-share with same-day SLAs.
And there are free-tier services that offer limited support, where users that don't pay anything expect to be treated like they're full-fledged customers.
There a limited scenario here, where a paying customer has so many problems with the product that the cost of support exceeds the revenue the customer provides, and when one can confidently say that this is not the result of an overly-needy customer, you spend the money figuring out the problem and making sure that the solution is available to help any customer that follows. The cost of support my exceed revenue for one customer, but once the solution is in the knowledge base, you don't have to repeat those costs again for the next customer.
But there are also small customers who fumble the product and put too much strain on support until a decision is made not to prioritize them over other customers. I have seen small customers with unreasonable expectations get "fired" simply because their revenue wasn't worth it.
If a company routinely sees support costs exceed revenue, that's usually the company's fault for having a faulty and/or hard-to-support product. If a single customer's support costs exceed the revenue they provide, that's usually the customer's fault for leaning too heavily on support to be their personal I.T. provider.
I don't have infinite time or patience, though. When blocked by a moat of hold times, chat bots, first level support scripts, etc, I will give up.
Yes, calls like mine are in the minority. But they are especially valuable, and I think well worth their share of the costs you describe.
Maybe companies should be identifying customers with above average tech skills, and routing them to better support channels next time they call.
Maybe we need shibboleet.
I don't know what the best solution is, but there must be a better way to do triage than funneling everyone into a flowchart of counterproductive misery, as is widespread today.
You'd be amazed at how not normal that is though. The number of people willing to throw up their hands to ask for help rather than researching anything is pretty damn high.
obviously not a problem with the technology itself, it was like that with more primitive answering machines as well, often there only to either answer the obvious things, or stonewall people with real problems with the product or service hoping they'd just give up and take the loss
"We are experiencing an greater than usual call volume, please wait while an agent becomes available" only to be randomly disconnected has been a thing for most of my life.
Everyone seems to be hyping open claw at the moment soon its just going to be LLMs talking to LLMs.... I wonder if they will develop a short hand and start talking in wingdings.
Instead, what we're likely going to get are "voice agents" calling each other when we could have just used email instead...
Most of the time it's simply not being aware of what's out there or just showing them a different work flow.
That being said. Your example of customers calling for support on things they shpuld be capable of figuring out themselves in is probably where AI is going to shine as first line support. Once (if?) AI voice chat is good enough to replace chatbots we may not even realize we're talking with an AI unless it tells us.
Yeah, Apple has best in class support. They tried monetising it through Applecare but thats largely broken down.
I cant stand Apple for a lot of reasons, but their phone support, and everything behind that like training, is about as good as you can possibly hope to achieve.
It certainly won't be cheap to run real-time AI voice chat, or any real-time AI chat. The AI costs that you currently see are heavily subsidized, just like OP's example of "VC backed competitors who are OK burning $$ to gain market share", it's the same. These AI companies are far from profitable, burning billions to insert themselves into customer support pipelines and everywhere else they can, and then the other foot will drop. Uber and Lyft are far more expensive today than when they started, and the price to run "AI" will also inflate when these companies have to pay off all the billions they've spent but didn't earn. I doubt it will end up costing much less if less at all than human support, with worse results.
Lots of it is RAG and knowledge base lookups, you don't need large fancy models. Indeed you want fast responses, so low parameter models are better.
TTS and ASR models are tiny now days, like a handful of GB tiny.
Last time I priced this all out the VOIP fees cost more than self hosting all the models.
And if it turns out to be your mistake (faulty product or missing documentation) as opposed to something the user could have reasonably solved by themselves, refund the charge and possibly provide compensation for the inconvenience.
But if one company stops doing it, eventually everyone has to stop doing it.
Then the race to the bottom begins...
> People demand free support.
> When I worked at Microsoft
Last I checked the common nicknames were "Microslop" and "Winblows"
Maybe if Microslop spent more time improving their product they'd spend less money and time on support.
Sorry, I have no empathy for a multi trillion dollar company that's shoving things down our throats. I'm sorry you had a frustrating experience as an employee but my feelings about a mega corp are very different. It's like watching someone wipe away their tears with hundred dollar bills
It's petty, but I haven't found a better disincentive.
I would think that's close to an hourly rate for first level support and calls are mostly resolved in ~10 mins?
Then you also have to pay them regardless of whether someone calls.
A rough rule of thumb is the full burdened cost of an hourly office knowledge worker is two to three times the gross hourly wage.
This doesn't seem like a bad thing when it comes to aligning incentives (assuming customers actually want a product they don't need help to use).
Same in the ISP space. ISP's with low margins often lose multiple months of revenue on a single support call.
This seemed pretty reasonable to me.
I often wonder that if you paid $60K for a top quality support person instead of $30K for two average people (or even $20K for 3 bad people) then the following might happen:
- you would get better support calls
- happier customers
- longer tenured employees
- all of the above would lead to a reputation as a company with AMAZING support
It's incredibly frustrating to spend a good 10 minutes navigating a website's complex web of menus to get a phone number (I think they deliberately try to hide it...). Then spend another 5 minutes listening to bots telling me to press 1 for English, only to fall into the wrong menu where the bot repeats some useless information I already know, say goodbye, then hang up.
Having a bot say to me: "we care about your concerns, and we value your business" is absurd and oxymoronic.
Compare this to say Chase, Amex, or Geico. I call, someone answers within 2 minutes and addresses all my problems/concerns in fluent English. I'd happily pay a premium for that.
Ok, SaaS it is then
>People demand to pay once and that's it.
Ok, ads, you got it.
>People demand no ads.
Ok, chatbot support then
>...
All alternatives which are capable of actually serving the customer are systematically driven out of business.
Had they built a better, more intuitive product, they would get fewer support calls and wouldn't be struggling with costs.
As I mentioned, due to high support costs we worked to improve the UX and we ended up dropping our support costs dramatically.
Doesn't change the fact that everyone who did call cost us more than our profit on the sale.
Customer support is expensive.
Microsoft used to charge for customer support back in the day (90s). The way it worked was that if it was your fault, you paid, if it was a product bug, there was no cost for support. While not a perfect system, it at least aligned everyone's incentives in the right direction. (The huge glaring flaw being it was MS that decided if they were going to charge you for the support call or not...)
The bigger problem to me is "help" is always framed as my needing to be educated, not a problem with the service. This is especially prevalent for technical customers who are legitimately trying to draw attention to a bug in the platform only to get how-to help articles pasted back to them.
For many users, this is often the case, and front line AI support like this can handle that pretty effectively while giving your case faster live support. Would you rather sit behind 4 people in the queue trying to figure out why their device doesn't work without batteries when it's not plugged in or have them deal with AI to solve the problem while you get your real issue sorted out quickly after dealing with a handful of basic prompts?
It's not quite at the level of the "shibboleet" XKCD, but I did once manage to get a much higher support tier at Comcast who was able to verify that 1) I had a problem that was their fault and 2) fix it. Even that guy was halfway on a script. Y'know, after I've read you a ping timeout three times from the Windows command line, I probably shouldn't have to read it verbatim to you again. It hasn't changed.
How many times at work have you been talking to someone else where they're using common words as jargon? Maybe it's something like "the online system" or "the platform". And it's perfectly clear to them what they mean, but everyone else in the company either doesn't know what that actually is, or they have a distorted idea based on the conventional definitions of the words. Even without LLMs in the mix, this can lead to people coming out of meetings with completely different understandings of what's going on.
My experience is few people are actually providing the relevant context to the LLM to explain what they mean in situations like this. Or they don't have the actual knowledge and are using the LLM in the hopes it'll fill in for their ignorance. The LLMs are RLHFed to sound confident, so they won't convey that they don't know what a piece of jargon means. Instead they'll use a combination of the common meaning and the rest of the context to invent something. When this gets copy/pasted and sent around, it causes everyone who isn't familiar to get the wrong idea. Hence "misunderstanding amplifier".
To the point of the article, this is soluble if people take the time to actually figure out what they are trying to convey. But if they did that, they wouldn't need the LLM in the first place.
I recently was dealing with the Amazon robot--after correctly identifying the items in the order it then proceeded to use short terms which were wrong, but make sense as what a classifier might have spit out. Instead of understanding being a shared thing it falls entirely on the user. Sufficiently adept user, this is fine. But a lot of users aren't sufficient adept.
Like:
BAD: "Write the specs for a system that does X Y and Z"
GOOD: "Write me a prompt to write the specs for a system that does X Y and Z."
As if the LLM magically knew all about itself and the best tips and tricks to prompt itself even if it had just came out and there was no scraped information on how to use them yet.
My first round of code review has become a back and forth with the original author just asking them questions about their description, before I even bother to look at code. At first I decided I’d just be a stick in the mud and juniors would learn to get it right the first time, but it turns out I’m just burning myself out due to spite instead.
"Don't make me talk to your [customer support] chatbot" reads like "Don't make me go to an ATM for a cash withdrawal". If I can solve a thing quickly and effectively without waiting forever to speak to an overworked customer support agent on another contitent, I would very much like that!
Well, anyways, the post is not about that. It's about posting AI-generated text (blog posts, PR summaries). Which I agree with, although there are a bunch of holes in the argument, such as:
> 1. Figure out what you want to say. 2. Say it. That first figuring-out part is important.
Well, yeah, I can figure out what I want to say, then have the chatbot say it. So looks like the second part is important, too.
Side note, the number of comments here from people who clearly didn’t read the article is impressive
As a reasonably technical user capable of using search, the only way this could really happen is if there was no web/app interface for something I wanted to do, but there was a chatbot/AI interface for it.
Perhaps companies will decide to go chatbot-first for these things, and perhaps customers will prefer that. But I doubt it to be honest - do people really want to use a fuzzy-logic CLI instead of a graphical interface? If not, why won't companies just get AI to implement the functionality in their other UIs?
Outside of customer service, I'm working on a website that has a huge amount of complexity to it, and would require a much larger interface than normal people would have patience for. So instead, those complex facets are exposed to an LLM as tools it can call, as appropriate based on a discussion with the user, and it can discuss the options with the user to help solve the UI discoverability problem.
I don't know yet if it's a good idea, but it does potentially solve one of the big issues with complex products - they can provide a simple interface to extreme complexity without overwhelming the user with an incredibly complex interface and demanding that they spend the time to learn it. Normally, designers handled this instead by just dumbing down every consumer facing product, and I'd love to see how users respond to this other setup.
If you need an LLM spin to convince management, maybe you can say something about "bring your own agent" and "openclaw", or something else along those lines?
I can see it working for complex products, for functionality I only want to use once in a blue moon. If it's something I'm doing regularly, I'd rather the LLM just tell me which submenu to find it in, or what command to type.
I don't know if I would call it idealism. I feel like what we're discovering is that while the efficiency of communication is important, the efficacy of communication is more important. And chatbots are far less reliable at communicating the important/relevant information correctly. It doesn't really matter how easy it is to send an email if the email simply says the wrong thing.
To your point though, it's just rude. I've already seen a few cases where people have been chastised for checking out of a conversation and effectively letting their chatbot engage for them. Those conversations revolved around respect and good faith, not efficiency (or even efficacy, for that matter).
That said, I 100% left every call center job I had when I couldn’t put up with the bullshit middle manager crap anymore.
Nothing like having a “team leader” who knows literally nothing about the product who then has to come up with the most nitpicky garbage because they’re required to have criticism on call reviews. Meanwhile some other asshole starts yelling at him to yell at you for not being on the phones enough when the reason I’m not on the phone is because everyone on the team turns to me to ask questions to because, unlike our illustrious leader, I know what I’m doing.
The different accents and call center background noise are features in their product.
That's the aspect I don't understand. The information I want is almost always something some other customers have asked already. I'd much prefer to avoid their customer support maze entirely and help myself on a searchable wiki. Unfortunately, most company's online product support FAQs usually only contain answers to obvious shit on the order of RTFM and "is it plugged in." Why not just post the doc their advanced tier 3 support people share amongst themselves? It can be under a warning label like 'preliminary advanced info for engineers'.
I realize people like me represent only around 2-3% of the customers seeking support but it's 2-3% that is able to self-serve and takes more time than average because we invariably have to work through front-line support to get escalated to someone with the non-obvious info that's still been asked many times before. So maybe we're only ~2% but we suck up 4% of support bandwidth and we probably take up closer to ~20% of Tier 3 support - the most expensive, scarce type.
A warning label like you mention is a possibility if that is considered to be necessary, although I think it might be better to have a file that you can download and read (or request by mail or telephone or fax, if this becomes necessary in some circumstances; do not assume the computer always works and is compatible with your file), instead of a searchable wiki.
I see it in a reddit post, or a twitter comment, I've suspected it in text messages. And like that angle, the like "you're a human. can you please, just" and feeling a little out there for pouring my soul into every word I right wherever it is, like, that idea resonates. That frustration to be reading a lengthy blurb in what's become an over-saturated style where I have to work even harder to discern their real meaning than if they were actually that verbose to begin with.
It's human nature to want to share your dreams, because they are fascinating to you.
However, it's also human nature to want to punch someone in the face when they start talking about this crazy dream they had last night ... because it has nothing to do with you, and doesn't interest you at all.
Similarly, when an AI says something useful to you, in response to your prompts, it's very particular to you. When you try to share it with others ... you get the article.
Companies want people to spend as much as possible while doing the minimum work on the product.
Chatbots let companies spend almost nothing while pretending to provide long-term support.
I wonder if something similar to a copyleft license could help. What if there was a contractual "fair business" pledge that companies could add? I imagine that good enough lawyers could craft something that essentially said, "You can only display this contract if you legally guarantee that you do X, Y, Z and do not do A, B C."
If the AI output was actually better than talking to a real human, more useful, more concise, serving the job to be done, then no one would have a problem with it. In fact they would appreciate it. That future is not here in many areas.
The problem is people are wielding AI right now and either [a] the models they are using are not good enough, [b] they aren't being given enough context, or [c] they are deployed in a way that makes it sloppy
(Insert joke about whether this comment is AI. It's not, but joke away)
(I could have sworn there was a popular HN submission a while back of this or a similar blog post, but damned if I can find it now.)
LLMs won't add information to context, so if the output is larger than the input then it's slop. They're much better at picking information out of context. If I have a corpus of information and prompt an extraction, the result may well contain more information than the prompt. It's not necessarily feasible to transfer the entire context, and also I've curated that specific result as suitably conveying the message I intend to convey.
This does all take effort.
My take is also that I am interested in what people say: I have priors for how worthwhile I expect it to be to read stuff written by various people, and I will update my priors when they give me things to read. If they give me slop, that's going to affect what I think of them, and I expect the same in return. I'm willing to work quite hard to avoid asking my colleagues to read or review slop.
This is so obviously true to intelligent people (and is even a point made in the article) ... it's sad that you're getting downvoted.
The OP wrote
> When I talk to a person, I expect that they are telling me things out of their head — that they have developed a belief and are trying to communicate it to me.
But when I'm having a conversation about a subject (rather than with a friend, partner, or other person with whom I have a relationship and the conversation is part of the having of that relationship) I don't care what is in that person's head, I care about the truth of the matter, so I'm far more interested in their sources, their logic and the validity of same. Unless I'm a psychologist doing a survey, why should I care about some random person's beliefs? Since I'm a truth seeker, I care about their arguments, and of course the quality of their arguments is of paramount importance. I appreciate people who can back up their arguments, and LLM summaries that are chock full of facts gleaned from the massive training data that includes a vast amount of human knowledge are fully appreciated--while being aware that hallucination is possible so I often double check things regardless of the source. OTOH, the pushback to this is from people I consider worse than irrelevant--they not only are willfully ignorant but they reject knowledge seeking for irrational ideological reasons. (I myself see the LLM industry to be extremely problematic, but as long as LLMs exist and are capable of producing quality signal--which is the given here--then I will use them.)
This whole page is illustrative: so many people are telling us things out of their head ... that have nothing to do with the article because they didn't read it. So they blather about their beliefs and opinions about support--because that's how they interpreted the title. These comments are useless.
P.S.
> If all you care about is the facts, and not the other’s relationship to them, why engage with a person at all?
I already said: I'm a truth seeker. Also I sometimes seek to persuade people in public forums--and not necessarily the person I'm corresponding with. And missing is any reason why I should care about internet randos' relationships with their beliefs, other than as a psychological survey.
> You could query a LLM for whatever subject, argument or counterpoint you wish.
I can do better, and can do more, as noted.
> Besides, your hypothetical summaries chock full of facts don’t exist, at least not yet. Most LLM summaries are chock full of filler, thus the name slop, thus why us “ignorant” people hate reading it.
This is an example of a belief that is not supported by the facts--if it's even a belief, which I doubt--it's emo ideology. Putting "ignorant" in quotes doesn't falsify it, and I have never encountered a remotely intelligent person who "hates" reading LLM summaries--this is in the same category as people who reject Wikipedia citations because "anyone can edit it". This person unintelligently reduces all LLM output to "slop"--maybe he should try actually reading the head article, which has a quite different take.
Besides, your hypothetical summaries chock full of facts don’t exist, at least not yet. Most LLM summaries are chock full of filler, thus the name slop, thus why us “ignorant” people hate reading it.
This last time, it sent me to a Chatbot. In five minutes, I got a cheaper rate than I was previously paying. I'm sort of looking forward to the next interaction to see if I can get even cheaper rates or finally cancel the service.
It's unfortunate that you keep accepting their lower rate though. If a very small percentage of people are willing to continue paying even at slightly lower rates the the vast majority of people, it is still earning them money. Maybe you really didn't want to cancel? I always thought wanting to cancel was black and white, but you've turned it into shades of gray.
Though maybe people will start supplying context like "no em dashes, and occasionally misspell a word or two", and soon you won't even be able to tell that.
Who knows how much of the comments on any website are written by humans now; yeah there are plenty of tells so it can be obvious, but that might only be for the exceptionally bad posts.
Checked LinkedIn and found four posts in a row that had "here's the kicker".
LinkedIn has always been a place full of low-effort posts for people trying to self-promote, so I guess it makes sense to have a robot actually do the thinking for something that is and always has been inherently mindless.
But frankly LLMs suck at writing. It's not only formulaic, it's uninspired!! So I worry that we're entering an era of mediocre writing. I like the "Have you considered writing?" suggestion. I've been trying to make a habit of writing book reviews so I can counter some of the writing atrophy I've developed. Hopefully it will help me become a better thinker too. As Ray says here: "Understanding your own point of view is an enriching exercise."
Seems to me like you're doing fine so far. (I hope I haven't just been letting my standards go down the drain...)
> It's not only formulaic, it's uninspired!
Heh.
I used a product that implemented a VERY good AI chatbot as part of their email support and it was better than human support. It was nearly instant in its response time and answered all of my questions perfectly.
In fact, it wasn't until after the interaction that I realized it was an AI bot! Pretty good IMO and I'd prefer that interaction over holding "...because your call IS important to us."
This article is not about support chatbots. It's about clearing up your writing/thoughts and communicating clearly even if you used a chatbot to get there.
When it comes to technical discussions, there are so many people on here just regurgitating what they read on an earlier thread. Maybe to test if what they heard was true. Maybe because they just want to sound smart. Not a lot of people actually trying things.
Anyways, I wish more people commented on what's actually in the article - i've observed what OP is complaining about happening in whatsapp groups too esp when there is a difference of opinion; people defer to calling Meta's in-chat AI instead of giving a bit more effort and stating _their_ view.
Don't make me talk to a chatbot while there is zero forward progress in solving the problem.
Forcing a customer anything beyond that is RUDE!
> The only acceptable pro-AI response to the accusation of AI Slop is to join team Anti-Slop.
I don't want to contact customer support in the first place, if I'm forced to, it's because something is very wrong and in that case I don't want to be listening to elevator music and "your call is important to us, please hold" for an hour, and get my call disconnected forcing me to call again.
Issue is that I've yet to have a chatbot actually fix my issues, or most 1st contact human operators for that matter.
We do need to be more tolerant of AI writing though. Some people need it because they can't express their ideas well themselves. You wouldn't say "no wheeled vehicles allowed inside" because that would exclude handicapped people who need wheelchairs.
No we don't, and neither should you. Don't make me read your chatbot's PR.
Apparently my mobile provider switched to a voice chatbot only phone system in September. I called them today because of a price increase and some weird long distance charges on my bill.
I call, the chatbot answers, I confirm my account info and enter my PIN then ask it “why did my price go up”, “your price went up because we made a change to your account”. Wow, super. I ask it if it can reduce the price, no. I ask it about the long distance charges and it tells me to check my account statement online. I ask to be transferred to an human and it asks why, but it does transfer me over to their callback system. As a first line of support defence, that wasn’t so bad.
The timing of the transfer is off so I only hear half of what the callback system says. It requires me to verify the number I want to be called back on, then I tells me I can type in a time I want the callback. I think to myself, is this 24 hour time, how does AM/PM work, what time-slots are available, how do those work?
While I’m thinking about all of this it repeats the instructions. I type in 1 minute into the future because I don’t want to waste my own time waiting, just please call me back ASAP. “That time was unavailable”. I guess that makes sense, it’s very soon and maybe slots are on 5 minute windows. I have to confirm my phone number again and I can enter a new time. I try 10 minutes from now, that’s on a clean 5 minute boundary. Nope. Confirm again and try the nearest 15 minute boundary. Nope — and this time it hangs up and I have to call back and start from zero.
I call back and explain to the bot (again) that I need to talk a human, it’s a billing issue, thanks. It fails to understand me and that seems to get it stuck in a loop. After two more turns it asking me to repeat myself I hang up and call back again. This time the bot does understands me and I try 3 more callback times for today, all of which fail, and it hangs up.
I’ve just spent 10 minutes talking to a wall and punching in numbers. The phone wall is clearly unassailable — all paths lead to the broken callback subsystem.
I try the text chat bot on the site. I convince it to put me in contact with a human chat operator, who I then have to convince it’s worth it for them to call me because he couldn’t help me and it took over 1 minute per chat turn/iteration.
Finally a human calls me! Before we can talk I need to open a text, click the link, then enter the code she tells me, then enter my account PIN. It felt like I might be getting phished, this required such a weird chain of info. She tells me they put a notice of the price increase in my December bill (which was the right amount, so I didn’t read it), so this is all above board. She says if I want a cheaper plan I should check the app and she won’t even tell me what the options are. I ask if they’ll price match competitors and she says no.
At this point I told her I was considering leaving if they won’t price match (and also that the new support service was very bad). She says she’s sorry to hear that, to check the app, then pauses and asks me if I’m happy with my internet services, as if anything about our interaction says “please sign me up with more services!” I know they have to ask about the upsell because they always do, but wow.
The entire reason I’ve been a customer so long was that for a decade I would call and within 5 minutes be able to update my account to a new plan. Usually the support staff were nice and could offer me some loyalty discount, and I was happy.
I just (as in just) finished cancelling my entire account, then checked HN, and “Don’t make me talk to your chatbot” is the top article. Serendipity at its finest.
The only way to deal with this is to make the implentation not worth it by constantly bypassing it to speak to a human and/or making it cost money by getting it to give you things you're not otherwise entitled to.
I really wonder how these things will handle prompt injection and similar things. I have no confidence any of this is secure.
Wait until this comes to healthcare and it'll be chatbots handling appeals to prior authorization denials, wasting even more physician time.
[1]: https://www.wired.com/story/air-canada-chatbot-refund-policy...
"Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things." Douglas Adams
I recall geocities, angelfire, all the chans.
The internet has always been a cesspool with little islands of quality floating in a proverbial sewage of human output. In theory AI slop will improve.
A racist, sexist, ignorant online community of humans 20 years ago, if it is still active, is almost certainly still a racist, sexist, and ignorant community today.
Similarly, email spam that is easy to automatically categorize is not a problem.
Making slop less sloppy makes the problem worse, not better. You could claim that that's only up to a threshold, but there's a pretty strong information theoretic argument against that.