alt Hacker News> But using an AI to reply to a human is just disrespectful. It says the organisation values their customer's time at less than their own.
One of the benefits of using AI to reply is faster replies... which values a customers time.
I think that good customer service can use AI. It's not AI composed replies that makes the customer service bad.
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I had a AI customer service interaction (it was explicit about being AI, used fin.ai iirc). At first I was amazed! It was doing email as fast as IM! And the first response seemed really knowledgeable and put me at ease.
But it failed to do a key step (generating a shipping label for me). I went back and forth over 21 messages trying to get it to do it. Then I wrote "escalate to a human" and an hour later someone replies with a shipping label directly.
I would much rather have had a slow but correct response than a fast but confidently-wrong response.
Before the AI first level support often wasn't allowed to type answers but instead copy paste one of the answers from the faq, which was extremely frustrating.
The chat would go like this:
- I have a question about "no vehicles in the park" policy. Does it include motorized wheelchairs?
- To guarantee safety and blablabla our policy is that no vehicles are allowed in the park.
- so can i go to the park with a wheelchair with a battery and electric engine?
- To guarantee safety and blablabla our policy is that no vehicles are allowed in the park. Please see our safety policy (link).
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A fast, shallow reply doesn't save a customer's time. It's just a useless volley back to the customer that keeps their request off the support queue.
It may burn off customer support engagement among customers who don't have the capacity or patience to keep pushing for help (this is a bad outcome for customers, but looks deceptively positive in vendor-side metrics), but for the remaining customers it just adds latency and work.