when the fog clears…
I’m not sure there will be a difference either way. Customer service jobs spent decades trying to train humans to act as much as robots as possible. Of course replacing them with a shitty bot seemed to make sense, they were already pretending to be shitty bots.
Any “quality” in customer support comes from individuals circumventing company rules to provide actual support to the customer. AI can’t do that.You’re right, absolutely spot on, about several things but ONE IN PARTICULAR is this:
A human being helping a customer is, quite literally, an act of circumvention. Customer service EXISTS, SPECIFICALLY, for scenarios that require exceptions and skilled, knowledgeable internal maneuvering within, between, and around the cold mechanisms of machinery and policy. We tend to think of, say, purchasing items at a store as standard operation, for instance. But really, from the perspective of the business, its objective is to RESTRICT access to goods and services. The cashier manages exceptions to this goal. If the company has its way, it would take your money while relinquishing NOTHING.
I do not agree with the idea that humans are being trained to act like robots. Any company with a customer service department is likely tracking the root causes of their customers’ issues. With enough data, they can identify the most common problems and their solutions. If the goal is to resolve a customer’s issue as quickly as possible (which seems like a reasonable assumption), it makes sense to guide the customer through the most common solutions first, as that will likely solve the problem.
If someone works in customer service and repeats the same script daily, it’s understandable that they may come across as robotic due to sheer boredom. A skilled customer service representative can recognize when to use the script and when to deviate. However, if a company fails to hire the right people and does not offer a fair salary, those best suited for the role are unlikely to take the job.
My wife is a customer service manager/trainer. Hiring actually competent people who know how to just listen to the customer and understand their needs is apparently really fucking hard. I’ve heard some stories of such dumbfuckery…
And once they are in, HR/lawyers make it so fucking hard to fire anyone. If you get a decent customer service person, either as an employer or customer, appreciate them.
With all the AI rollout in customer support, I’ve essentially built up a habit of almost immediately trying to get in touch with a human if the bot doesn’t give me what I’m looking for right away. My experience is that in most cases, the bot will try to walk me in circles, recommending that I try stuff I’ve already tried (that’s why I’m contacting support). In all those cases, the bot isn’t saving the company any time, it’s just wasting my time and making me irritated.
In some cases it does save them support capacity, if only because I eventually give up on getting any support and just quit the service.
Well yeah the AI support is just the next iteration of confusing telephone trees and long wait times. The direct hope is that they make it just convoluted enough that a chunk of people that they before would have to “waste money” serving and fixing whatever problem they had will instead just give up without opening them up to liability for denying service. Only now they can do it while hiring even fewer actual people to handle the cases that get through.
Klarna claimed that AI chatbots were handling two-thirds of customer service conversations within their first month of deployment and went on to claim that AI was doing the work of 700 customer service agents. The problem is that it’s really doing the work of 700 really bad agents, and that quality took a toll.
I think the problem here was in correctly identifying which tasks are simple enough for a bad customer service AI to handle. Anything more complicated than that should be given to a human.
They are still going ai first on everything but customer support though. Any person who quits apparently won’t get the position filled by anyone else, whoever is left needs to try to use ai to make up for that person
I love technology but I hate censorship.
