Technology

The other day I was able to take care of what I thought was a reasonably complicated customer service issue through an automated assistant.

I take a daily prescription medication and it’s on automatic refill. However now and then I forget to take my pill and then I have an extra. After years of this I found myself with 20-30 pills left when my next bottle was ready.

So I tried to call the pharmacy and say hey that bottle of pills you have waiting for me? I still need it, but not for about 3 weeks. Can you push my entire schedule back that much but otherwise keep the pace the same?

Turned out I was able to do this just by listening to menus, selecting from multiple choice, and entering numbers for dates.

I was so satisfied! I don’t want to talk to a human if I can possibly help it. I’d much rather deal with an automated system as long as it can do what’s needed. The problem is that most of them can’t. But then again most customer service humans are useless too, so…

Yeah it turns out that using a statistical model to handle customer service leads to a degraded customer experience, because statistical models aren't humans and lack many human attributes.

Honestly, I'll take anything over those outsourced call centers at this point. Half of those representatives barely speak English.

The telephone services i had to use in my Lifetime were so insanely bad, thats one of the few things llm could do better than an underpaid person who has no will to live anymore and got yelled at for hours. This shit needs to end.

Unless they hate it enough to ditch a business or service in great enough numbers that it costs the business more money than they save by outsourcing to a computer, people had better get used to it.

Hmm, I wonder why... 🤔🤷‍♂️

"I'm sorry you're frustrated, perhaps it's time to start a new topic.'

"I'm not going to respond to that."

"I only use my powers for good!”

The companies will profit again now with your voice being used to train AI

I love the idea of useful and improved AI-automations, based on the fact every site currently has a “customer service robot” that have never once helped with a resolution at all.

IMO it can eliminate a huge amount of support queries and leave the important stuff to the actual agent if done right. …with the caveat of yeah fuck AI if it’s fully instead of agents.

Tbf most consumers hate all customer service.

While I’d prefer to just speak to a human, I’d much prefer AI over the status quo of dead dumb automated systems that just keep looping through the same preset options until you get enraged and give up or mash zero

When I call somewhere and get a live person I ask for them to give me the machine because a machine is easier to deal with.

It is now at the point where we need to ask how they plan on handling complaints and problems. And if the answer is not correct, go somewhere else. Up till now this was never something we needed to worry about

Ooh, there's a fun question:

Would you rather:

An AI handle customer service, or

An overseas call center handle customer service

?