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…

Around my way, we have a pizza chain where they've began utilizing AI to take orders over the phone. The only screw up the AI made was that at first, before the process of taking our order down, it wanted to confirm that we live within the delivery distance, so we provided our home address and it verified that we were within range of delivery, after taking the order and repeating it back to us, including that the order will be delivered to our home address (providing the details of the home address) within a certain time range, the moment it asked us if this information is correct, we said yes and then a long pause, and it responded that it could not verify our home address.

Wat.

And because we decided to speak to a human, it apparently dumped the entire order and the person who answered our call did not have access to all the details we provided the AI.

Pretty much wasted a little over 5 minutes with the AI.

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

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.

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.

"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!”

Hmm, I wonder why... 🤔🤷‍♂️

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

Ooh, there's a fun question:

Would you rather:

An AI handle customer service, or

An overseas call center handle customer service

?

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.