in reality 50-80% of callers come in with easily answerable questions because they don't know how to nav the website and prefer to ask in natural language
The vast majority of callers call in to resolve their issue, and most don't care if they are speaking to a bot because they just want their issue fixed. Agents (if implemented well) are an order of magnitude more effective at resolving issues compared to a call centre worker who is reading off a script and churn within 9 months
There's also the 2nd order effs of making CX cheap. before, there is the perverse incentive of companies trying to keep you off support because each call costs them way more than the value they get. if your cost per call drops 100x you can invest in turning a cost centre into a revenue driver (+ a better experience)
> Agents (if implemented well) are an order of magnitude more effective at resolving issues compared to a call centre worker who is reading off a script and churn within 9 months
But it seems like companies don't want to do this part, possibly because of fears that someone will trick the agent into giving them a refund or something. Or because the actual goal is to optimize for fewer costly refunds/cancellations/policy exceptions etc.
So for whatever reason, they stay stuck in that useless local maxima while simultaneously making traditional help increasingly difficult to get ahold of when needed for an overall net worse experience as a customer.
Refunds could require approval. And, it could not be just the agent's sole decision.
I'm also bullish because AI coding agents give up easily if my problem is complicated.
I think it'll be easier to convince an AI to transfer me to level 2 support than a human.
I’d say the vast majority of callers absolutely hate talking to these things and spend most of the call trying to get to a human, often getting frustrated and hanging up (shows up positive in the metrics, call handled without transfer!).
Though I’m not sure the companies deploying them really care, they’re just happy they can fire call center employees.
I'm sure AI Support Agents will be implemented better, but so far in my experience, the humans I connect to far outperform the AI agents.
Their implementation is rather cumbersome, requiring implementation fees and AI configuration that is rather bespoke to Sierra. Anyone rolling off of Sierra will find there is nothing they can take with them.
In general, I think CX ought to disappear as a vertical in an AI world. If I'm talking to a product AI and need support, why should I switch to another AI to do that? Even if that second AI is invoked by the first as a tool, how much am I gaining?
Interestingly, the first and best implementers of AI support so far have been at companies that roll their own.
There is nothing unique to CX about AI, as far as I can tell. Sierra is still just the same AI infra people are putting in products. Granted, you can make good money positioning yourself this way, but I expect on some time horizon they will need to reposition.
1. There are already apps/websites as an alternative for CSAs. Most of the time I have to call someone its because I couldn't do what I wanted through those portals, so adding an AI agent to the chain is unlikely to prevent an immediate escalation to a human.
2. How much money are you really going to save this way? CSAs aren't high salary employees. Sure you might need a bunch of them, but we've already seen that brand loyalty erodes quickly when you remove the human touch. United/Spirit airlines offer opposing views on the cut your way to profitability perspective.
3. "Pay only for good outcomes" isn't going to last.
4. Are agents good enough to even do this? Yes, the cherrypicked examples sound good, but... I just know how well coding agents really work and my only experiences with voice agents in the wild have been very poor so far.
This is funding for established tech businessmen; what the business claims to do doesn't matter beyond having "AI" in it.
1. most people (average, non-tech people) reach for the phone to call in for easily solvable problems. Plus, if the agent is integrated deep enough & has tools to interact with crms, you can raise the ceiling on the types of problems it can solve.
You're trying to avoid the bad customer experience of human 1 reading off their script, then they transfer you to some other department who may or may not know how to solve your problem, and the entire interaction cost the company way more than the value created, so the company is disincentivized to help customers.
2. All the companies in this space start with the outsourced BPO market for cx (multi billion market still) but the next market is going to be in revenue generation and churn prevention at scale, i.e. how do you proactively avoid customer issues, how do you upsell and generate revenue instead of reducing cost, how do you keep customers happy?
3. I think more companies will pivot to outcome based pricing on the contrary, makes it so much more measurable than seat-based and protects margins better than usage based. Plus cx is one of the few industries with very well known metrics
4. Kind of? Most companies in this space don't use native voice models which are noticeably dumber, they use transcription + a stronger text model + TTS. The majority of customers can be handled with the latest SOTA text model and you need smart context engineering to handle the long tail of more complicated asks
3. Cool so the user didn’t indicate if they were satisfied. What then?
4. You can’t use a SOTA model right now for reasoning, there’s too much latency for a conversation. So you’re either using an older, but significantly less capable model, or you’re paying out the nose for fast mode. If the former then you can’t trust the agent to do the right thing (see points 1&2). If the latter, there’s no cost savings over a human. So which is it?
A lot of money. Managing a large group of people needs structure. It comes with tons of headaches and cost.
In terms of the investment:
It's Bret Taylor who has one of the most impressive background in tech. He can raise any amount he wants. VC bets on the person, not the business.
If Bret Taylor allowed me to invest, I would have invested too.
> Bret is Co-Founder of Sierra. Most recently, he served as Co-CEO of Salesforce. Prior to Salesforce, Bret founded Quip and was CTO of Facebook. He started his career at Google, where he co-created Google Maps. Bret serves on the board of OpenAI.
Well worth a read even if you are generally anti-AI.
> Ensure you only pay for the value Sierra delivers with outcome-based pricing.
Yeah... that won't last.
The tree is structured and gives me an immediate sense of how to map my task to the support offering. If I’m calling, I probably have an issue that I can’t self-serve resolve via the customer portal or whatever, so walking the tree lets me get an idea of who can help.
The “voice assistant” gives me no sense of what the system is capable of or how to take advantage of those capabilities. So I’m left guessing at phrases or functions based off of the assumption that there’s still some kind of tree-like structure that’s been abstracted away. Same outcome, more cognitive overhead, plus I usually have to shout in my best William … Shatner … impression to get it to understand me.
E.g. instead of waiting for the IVR tree to be read out to find out you needed to press 4 for the shipping department the AI asks "Please state the department you wish to connect to or reason for calling" and you just say "shipping" (or however much of a life story you want to give it) and it's the call system's job to figure out where in the menu that is instead. For repeat calls once you know its AI call routing you can just say "shipping" right as the call starts, the same as you'd known press "4" before the 2nd time around an IVR tree, except you don't have to remember the random digits.
but even a simple impl to answer questions can knock out like 50% of callers who are tech-illiterate at 100x cheaper cost, it's just strictly better economics and better for those customers
That said, my life hack for these things to get escalated to a human is to just keep saying or typing curse words. Usually that triggers a "connect to human" flow. I can't promise it will always work, but I can say it has worked every time I have tried it.
their moat is distribution
It is trust.
Everyone in the valley knows Bret Taylor and will back any project he does, even if the product has no distribution.
The same way everyone in the valley knows Naval Ravikant for example, angels and VCs will back any project he does even if his product has no distribution.
It's a moat from a defensive perspective. It's a firehose from an offensive one. Outside state capture, most moats are both.
obviously the product needs to deliver and nrr needs to be good in the long run
> OpenAI has appointed Paul M. Nakasone, a retired general of the US Army and a former head of the National Security Agency (NSA), to its board of directors, the company announced on Thursday.
and the money quote:
> “Artificial intelligence has the potential to have huge positive impacts on people’s lives, but it can only meet this potential if these innovations are securely built and deployed,“ board chair Bret Taylor said in a statement. “General Nakasone’s unparalleled experience in areas like cybersecurity will help guide OpenAI in achieving its mission of ensuring artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.”
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/anime_titties/comments/1dh4wx4/form...
Ideally, businesses will escalate to an empowered human for all undefined parts of the flowchart. In practice, I truly hope it will be better than the current pre-recorded phone tree system that leads to a human following a script.
I personally only call support because a fix is not available through an organization's website.
They seem to be a "for pricing, let's go play C-level golf" type of company.
For myself - and admittedly maybe I’m just far out on the long tail of customers - I think these need to be treated like self driving cars, where 98% of the way there just isn’t good enough to cut it for me.
I think of support channels are just there to deflect customers and not really support anything. An AI bot will have infinite patience for that kind of interaction. Empowerment is never part of the equation.
We clearly do not live in the same universe.
I don't know much about their product offerings, but I was doing some speech-to-text work and came across https://research.sierra.ai/mubench/ for comparing current models. It felt fairly thoughtful, particularly in regards to coming up with better benchmarking metrics than word error rate.
As an aside, my favorite Sierra Entertainment logo version is probably the 1983-1993 version [1]. I think the design still holds up even today.
[0] https://velvetshark.com/ai-company-logos-that-look-like-butt...
1. https://preview.redd.it/remember-sierra-games-1979-2008-they...
https://sierrachest.com/gfx/Publications/IA/IA_8_1/023_Inter...
Since I also barely spoke English at the time, I got stuck in the game itself pretty soon anyway. Didn't manage to figure out how to say some things the right way. "Ken sent me" is the last thing I remember from it... and I never had any idea that the game was rather dirty until much later.
One of the most beautiful game logos, going back to the early nineties.
There are 26 letters and millions of words; people should choose other ones.
But there was one idea in QfG that I wish more games would use. Namely, designing three different solutions for every problem the player is facing. This idea works so well to create a sense of possibility in a game, I don't know why it got forgotten.
EDIT: holy shit I stand corrected: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lode_Runner
