What is is about management where they can't see how bad and half-baked these customer service agents are, but the customer can tell INSTANTLY they're AI and just not helpful in the slightest

This reminds me that I have to write my dentist. They replaced their beep answering machine with an AI chatbot, and the experience is horrible. I just want to say what I want, have it transcribed to text, and then have a human do something about it. It. I don't want to have to slowly explain to a bot who is just going to do the same thing.

Plus, the first time you encounter it, it doesn't identify itself as a bot for a couple sentences. And it's convincing enough that you fall for it. The feeling of being let down and realizing that you were just talking to a chump robot is severe, and is now associated with my dentist's brand.

The ever dreaded automated phone systems are more tolerable than the AI driven phone systems. The press 1 for... never tried to make you think someone was actually listening to you, yet the AI services are made to come across like you are talking to a human. Don't try to make people think it's a human.

I recently took my car to the dealership to get my A/C fixed. On the drive home, I discovered that they'd somehow screwed up my blinkers when they were fixing their A/C. When I called the next day to explain the problem, confirm they knew it was their issue to fix at no cost and to schedule a time to come in I got an AI Assistant. An AI Assistant that has not been trained to expect an issue to be their fault and who kept trying to direct me book on their site or to book a new appointment to get the problem fixed at my cost through her.

The dealership's decision to hand things over to AI, and to choose to focus that AI on only booking appointments instead of fixing problems is a proverbial F U to me. It's the dealership shifting more work on to me. It's disrespectful and wasteful of my time. By the time I managed to get to a human I was angry and distrustful.

I went through the text logs for ours and it was all:

"Fuck off and pass me to a human" and stuff like that.

No one wants this who's calling you. We are literally damaging our company with it.

I really want to agree and I can fill the rage building inside me when I talk to one... but on the flip side I just had a conversation with the Amazon one and it fixed my weird incorrect region/country problem in about 5 minutes. I was filled with rage the entire time, but it fixed my problem.

Do the customers know they're interacting with AI? If so, is that the intention?

My main issue with these systems is that they tend to not be able to do anything beyond what I can do myself in whatever self-service portal is available. If I'm calling, it's because I need support beyond what the bot can probably provide, and it just becomes a matter of arguing with the robot to get to a human who can actually solve my problem.

I’ve had to use one of these to book something with a service company. It was horrible. It’s like talking to Pinnochio… there’s nothing there. And it’s trying to sound human and conversational. It’s creepy and annoying.

Just give me a human being or a plain voice menu.

Businesses just don’t want to pay people if they can help it. Some things are inefficient. Get over it.

I was helping an 80+ year old with a phone problem this week. Dealing with the AI CSA was so frustrating. I don't think this lady was ready to burn down data centers that morning, but I think she was looking for a pitchfork by the afternoon.

I don't immediately hate talking to an chatbot, my dislike comes from chatbots that sound like humans but can't actually do anything useful. Maybe it just searches the KB and returns an article or maybe it just collects information for the ticket and I still need to wait for a human to reply back. Like I know how to search the KB, I wouldn't be trying to talk to support if I didn't have a real issue. Or it takes forever giving my information to a seemingly real person only to be told to wait, just let me fill out a form and give me a queue ETA. And half the time the real agent can't see the AI messages so I'm stuck repeating myself. Or my question is a very simple one that an AI agent could have the capability of figuring out (is the system down? Unlock my account, etc) but it can't because it's incapable of doing anything other than maybe searching the KB.

It's like you hired the dumbest idiot to answer support phone calls who can't do anything other than cold transferring me to someone that can do stuff. It seriously makes me reconsider doing business with them. What critical expense did they neglect in order to have the funds for an AI idiot? It just feels like corner cutting or something to impress stakeholders that doesn't actually improve product quality or worker efficiency, it's just a vanity project.

If you're not willing to build an AI agent that can actually do real work while also being hardened against exploits (see Instagram), do not spend the money. You are either just going to waste money on the dumbest receptionist money can buy or you are giving away the keys to the kingdom to anyone with a clever prompt.

If an AI customer service agent disclosed what capabilities it has that go beyond what I can do by myself, that would be an immediate improvement.

It depends. Sometimes I have really stupid questions and I don't want to read the website, when I know I don't annoy a human when I click "chat" I may use it to ask my stupid question.

But this is a exception most of the time I just try to confuse the AI to get to an actual human faster.

People say jobs with the "human touch" will stay relevant after AGI. And I'm like have you seen customer service? I can't even find the phone number anymore on amazon

Part of the problem is that even if you did a good job it doesn't really matter because the rest of the industry isn't, so no user wants to give you a chance

I immediately skip all youtube ads that are AI generated, and I can easily spot them. Not just that, I am planning to actively avoid those brands that are doing this. A small way to send a message that this form of AI sucks. In addition, I make it a point to compliment humans that assist me in customer support, and ask them to tell their management that they need to hire more humans.

If I were a manager I would be excited as well. Product quality doesn’t seem to be a metric that is actually correlated with executive bonuses, reducing cost is.

It’s why enshitification is so common. Create a tool that quantifies quality in a usable way as a metric and you change the entire economy.

> even though management thinks it’s a great success the metrics tell a totally different story.

::2065, in a US Social Studies class::

And that, children, across many industries, along with the unfortunately-timed chatbot craze, then believed to be real AI, is the surprisingly simple origin of Corporate Optimistic Cynical Braindeadism. It’s a bit wordy, but it was LLM-generated before the Big Correction, and nobody bothered to fix it.

That’s because customer support should be the absolute last place that an AI agent is used that might be one of the few places you will need humans in the loop for a while because that’s where people go when everything else doesn’t work

It wasn't obvious from the project outset that everyone would hate it, no matter how well designed it is?

>Before you think we did a bad job with our solution, I can tell you we went with some of the best and did our own intensive testing and worked on latencies etc., I actually thought the final version was pretty good but our customers just hated it.

I bet you did a bad job with your solution.

I hate AI (or humans following scripts like robots) customer service because they don't actually provide service. They jerk you around in circles, don't understand basic things, can't help, and take forever.

People don't hate customer service when they feel like they have been served.

[dead]

Guarantee this is a generational split.

The younger demographics will prefer the AI bot to talk to.