this post was submitted on 16 Feb 2024
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Air Canada must honor refund policy invented by airline’s chatbot (arstechnica.com)
submitted 9 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
70 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Air Canada appears to have quietly killed its costly chatbot support.

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[–] [email protected] 69 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Experts told the Vancouver Sun that Air Canada may have succeeded in avoiding liability in Moffatt's case if its chatbot had warned customers that the information that the chatbot provided may not be accurate.

So why would anybody use a chatbot?

[–] [email protected] 29 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Customers are forced to. Companies would rather give shitty and inaccurate information with the veneer of helping someone rather than pay a human to actually help someone.

They will continue using chatbots as long as they think it won't cost them more in lost customers or this sort of billing dispute than it saves them in not paying people. What was this, $600? That's fuckall compared to a salary. $600 could happen a few hundred times a year and they'd still be profiting after firing some people.

It's off for now, but it will return after the lawyers have had a go at making the company not liable for the chatbot's errors.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Customers are forced to.

Only if there are no competing companies who use less shitty tools.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

Uh huh like they don't all follow each other in their cost cutting.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

And do you really think there will be in a few more years?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago

600$

To employ someone at 10$/hr, their actual cost is probably close to 15$/hr when you factor I them coming in to work in the office and all the costs associated with that. At 15$/hr it takes 40 hrs to cost 600$ to thr company. That is one week of work for one employee. This means that they could have a 600$ fuck up every week and still break even over hiring a person. And we are talking about just one person. Chat support is nor.ally contracted out as entire teams and departments.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

They are useful to handle simple, common questions. But there always should be an option to talk to a human instead.