Much as I'm a grouchy curmudgeony geezer at heart, I must begrudgingly admit that at my company, the "HR Chatbot" went from "complete waste of time" to "can, shockingly, answer my questions most of the time" in the last 5 years. It's actually pretty good these days, and has good paths to guide it, constrain it, or escalate to a human. Mind you a) This is for internal customers not external and b) I don't think it's LLM in the backend, mind you, but not every AI is LLM.
This is not to say that I enjoy the current level of customer service or its direction, but honestly I have not enjoyed customer service levels for the last 25 years, on average, well before AI. The problem is usually fundamentally corporate policies and priorities and processes, not whether they're implemented by a human or AI. In the perfect world of unicorns and rainbows, I'm OK with the concept/goal of "90% of repetitive questions/requests get handled automatically, save humans for where human judgment is required". So I guess there's a semi-optimistic part of me in addition to the grouchy geezer :)
People will use the contact page on my website to ask me questions all the time.
In many cases, they will ignore all the content that answers their question, skip the part of the contact page that tells them to use the search first and that I don't offer services, find my email address and ask me to do work for them.
Some people are just unwilling to help themselves. Just thinking of how many times people outsource their Google search to a community.
Much of the time you have to call support to get them to do this they don't want to be easy to do - like cancelling subscriptions, or initiating a refund.
This is only true for some customers, who obsessively research a solution before reaching out to support.
Having worked in CS roles early in my career, 95% of tickets are covered verbatim by an FAQ macro. For some (most) people, it just never occurs to them to search/research their question.
> For some (most) people, it just never occurs to them to search/research their question.
I think this is more of an illusion because you're close to the action. Just think of how many times you looked for your phone while holding it in your hand? or how you missed your keys that where on the table multiple times until someone else pointed it out. How many time you could swear you had to flip the USB 3 times before you could plug it in.
This preception happens whenever there's an imbalance. For you, this system is centric to your life, you know it inside out, while for customer, it's a 1/100 fraction in their life and it's also not functioning at the moment and they need to move on. So there's a mix of inexperience, stress, fear to DIY and f it up, etc.
When you personally contact support for another service, you think of it as normal, you done your homework, it's a serious issue, you rarely do it, you think you're an example of a good customer, the problem is with their product, but on the other side, at scale, it's another customer who didn't bother to RTFM or learn their 100s of courses. At scale, you're not going to sit and imagine the life of every person and plot different complex scenarios of how they got here, your brain just takes the easy way out and say it was clear as day, there's no possible excuse other than they didn't look.
This is one ugly side-effect of having "departments", you only ever see one side. In the past, you both lived in the same town, you have a business, they have a business, you got invited to their wedding, your kids played with their kids, etc. Now you only see people outside your inner circle through one lens. If you're in sales you see $$, if you're in support you see purely clueless people.
> When you personally contact support for another service, you think of it as normal, you done your homework, it's a serious issue, you rarely do it, you think you're an example of a good customer, the problem is with their product, but on the other side, at scale, it's another customer who didn't bother to RTFM or learn their 100s of courses.
I don't think this is true, because when I contact support, it's because I need the company to take some specific action that isn't an action that customers can take themselves.
In the past week, I've contacted customer support for:
1. The local cable provider to get a work order to fix the damaged line to my house.
2. A product I ordered online that arrived damaged and with a missing piece - I need them to ship me replacement parts.
3. A company with online shopping where my account is unable to place orders - I need to escalate to someone who can actually fix my account.
In the past week the CSR you worked with had a hundred cases of 'it wont turn on ---> you need to plug it in' and another hundred 'where is my package --> let me check the tracking number we sent you, it is out for delivery'.
When I was a CSR I had a 2% escalation rate. That means 98% of the calls did not actually require any action to fulfill.
If people only called for the kinds of thing you mentioned, a given company could have like 5 CSRs and answer on the first ring every time. Instead the queue has 1 person like you and 99 people who arent sure what 'this end up' means, which is why now everyone has to survive a filter before they are allowed to have their message read by a human.
Because it's not true? Anyone who has ever been close to the customer support role knows that there is a constant battle to help the customers answer questions on their own, and you will never be completely successful.
It seems some people prefer calling/chatting to finding info on their own. Even trivial info.
I call one of my utilities every month to get them to tell me the same thing (flush the cookies) so I can pay my bill. They can't be bothered to fix their website and I have the free time so...
