Most of the others are terrible. I'll pick on Dell for this next one. Their website in general, is terrible. Why would their support agent be any better?
We purchased a switch from Dell, that cost more than my SUV. Having a hardware issue with it, can't remember if it was fans or a power supply or what. It needs someone to come out and repair it, and we have the big fancy service plan.
There's no way to find the switch on the Dell support website. It's not listed anywhere.
https://www.dell.com/support/home/en-us/products/networking_...
You can't actually contact support, you have to identify your device, and then you get options from there.
https://www.dell.com/support/incidents-online/en-us/contactu...
However, this product doesn't have a service tag, or express service code, so you can't do that.
So you try to use the 'Virtual Assistant', who has no idea what you're trying to tell it, no matter which way you try. They link to a contact page but you just end up getting looped back around. There is no useful information to be extracted from this dumb thing.
I finally found a phone number on the website, and was connected to a woman who sounded like she was smoking cigarettes in a basement somewhere in Alabama. She looked through her notes on the computer, and found out for this particular switch I need to go through the OEM manufacturer. I was relieved to have gotten useful information.
They are primarily for making customers go away. The terrible support experience was already standard - they are just automating the "go away" experience.
Also, a relief we dropped Dell for these exact reasons a few years ago. Seems nothing has changed and it’s good we got away from them.
They want you to diagnose the issue, and to be the remote hands. Shuffling around DIMMs and drives and re-seating cables and all kinds of crap. Just send someone to out fix the damn thing like HPE does.
The ironic part is that Dell was once known to provide excellent onsite repairs without too much hassle. Now they are known for the exact opposite. So, someone at Dell is running their customer service into the ground.
No one who actually wants to provide a good experience for their customers would offshore, nor would they offload this to AI agents. They know that customers have very limited opportunities nowadays, so the company responses seem to be along the lines of, "fine, go somewhere else! Oh, there's nowhere else to go? I guess you'll be staying with us afterall muahaha!"
People here lack a lot of nuance.
You think the average consumer is willing to fight firms hard to get stuff fixed? Absolutely not. Things like switching costs is what firms take advantage of -> they know you most likely arent going anywhere so shut up and accept the poor service.
Would people here generally fight and switch? Sure. But you lot are what % of the population..?
After putting in AI agents this year, our customer service scores went up considerably. And the reason was basically that the average customer was getting way faster answers to queries.
This is not a plug and play customer bot product, we actually built a custom solution on top of Bedrock.
- Finding information in the background / performing an account health check instead of putting the caller on hold for 20 minutes.
- Helping newer consultants find the same offers experienced staff know about amongst 200 pages of active/targeted offers.
- Automatically documenting calls so when someone calls back, they don’t get a “sorry, I can’t find any notes about that on your account”.
- Giving the offshore call center consultant a customized script based on the active discussion instead of a generic one
(Yes, reading from a script is still bad, but at least this makes it somewhat more natural rather than it feeling like you’re talking to a lobotomised employee.)
But this doesn't make sense. The AI bots are worse at the job, across all metrics, other than being cheaper. They're not "investing in the technology" in the sense of actual investment. They are just trying to save money. That's it.
If they cared about the experience of their customers, they wouldn't touch these things with a barge pole.
They are already fairly cost effective. A the Corporate VC arms of the major call center and BPO players like Infosys, TCS, and others have already funded a large portion of TTS startups, and in a lot of cases are training on customer calls.
There's a reason ElevenLabs, Deepgram, and others are the giants they are now.
I believe Sierra is the market leader in this space with a few other companies like Salesforce and Decagon also competing. It would be more interesting to see an evaluation of performance by these parties before making sweeping claims about the performance of AI agents as a whole.
Usually when I chat with a support bot it doesn't feel like an LLM but something that performs keyword matching and a prewritten response pre-LLM era.
But all shibboleths are obsolete now.
- California’s AB 1609 requires large businesses to connect customers with human agents within 15 minutes.
- Businesses exceeding $500 million in revenue must display wait times and disclose chatbot interactions.
- Violations carry civil penalties starting at $5,000, making human access a legal obligation.
"We're sorry, we're receiving more calls than usual, stand by..."
24/7 for over 30 years!
Think about all the time and effort for all of the consumers in the aggregate that would be needed to hold corporate counter parties accountable, with the cost being code and some compute time on device. This is where AI agents shine. They can do the mundane work of capturing evidence of compliance violations, time stamping, packaging the violation event, and shipping to an endpoint for reporting them.
Every consumer’s phone becomes a regulator watchdog node. We can even use LLMs to rapidly ship the app(s) needed to do this.
Status: (Engrossed - Dead) 2016-11-30
Link fixed! Thank you! Additional citations:
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billHistoryClient.x...
https://www.gov.ca.gov/2026/09/28/governor-newsom-signs-comm...
However, if I need support and cannot reach a real living breathing human in under 30 min regarding any purchase over $500, I hang up, call AmEx and file a chargeback, citing inability to gain support. So far they have backed me every time. If enough people do it, chargeback costs send the message.
It can be summed up thus : AI agents answer the phone slightly more often, but they get hung up on 7 times more often than humans. Overall they make customer service and your business work much worse.
It is also a bullshit advertorial for a product; In this case, an AI sales agent. There is (almost) no worse idea in human history than an AI agent trying to sell things to people. Their entire website is AI generated, and is so stuffed full of slop that it's impossible to read.