I'll take an alternative view of someone else's comment. No offense, but how much shittier will my customer service experience with my power company or ISP be because of this?
I'll take an alternative view of someone else's comment. No offense, but how much shittier will my customer service experience with my power company or ISP be because of this?
I'm someone who builds these types of voice agent systems for businesses. And the short answer is, I think especially for the bigger corporations, customer service probably will get shittier.
It doesn't have to be inevitable...but the track record of big corps and their view of customer-facing departments as being loss-centers instead of being directly and indirectly connected to retaining and bringing in revenue doesn't leave me optimistic.
For small-to-medium businesses...it just depends. SMBs are typically more sensitive to the opinions and sentiments of their customers (and also bad press) and also typically have workers with relatively more institutional and tacit knowledge compared to big corporations. So I would like to believe more of them will be much more methodical and intentional about their approaches (especially with cautionary tales like Klarna and DuoLingo). There's no reason for any business to ruin their customer service with AI other than impulsive and/or poorly executed decisions being made out of some mix of fear, hype, greed, or willful ignorance. Entirely avoidable.
Possibly better, possibly worse.
The bot will have more info and doesn't degrade every few years (as nobody is there to be replaced and lose the tribal knowledge that makes a business run).
It also.. is just a dumb bot and _only_ knows what it is told.
as somebody who works in this area: depends on how much effort they will be willing to invest. it might be better than current service or it might be worse.
big question will be availability of humans as fall back that actually have some skills
I still can't wrap my head around how making functional online portals and well written documentation for customers is too hard, but laying off entire call centers and replacing them with a chat bot that relies on checks notes a functional set of APIs for tool use and well written documentation for a KB, is easier. It looks like all the same effort plus more!
You're not wrong. Businesses that do that are going to be in for a rude surprise. Time will tell if they care about pissing off their customers more than they care about getting rid of workers.
you overestimate customers. most of them not going to bother to read documentation . used to work closely with big telecoms. amount of support calls that are resolved by "make sure that connector is tight" is crazy high (they invented f-type connectors that work even when they are not tightened properly). "reboot it", solves most of remaining issues.
imho, human populated callcenters may actually become a good business model in a few years, after everybody will fire their personal to replace it with AI, and will discover that in some cases you need humans
No offense, but how about evaluating the project on its own merits?
In my experience AI based CS agents are not deployed to actually provide customer service. That does not differ too much from the "old school" phone call centre with scripts etc.
Anyway, you can run a phone exchange on a RPi. My favorite anti marketing thing is a simple IVR: "If you think we would like to speak to press 1, if you are making an unsolicited sales call, then hang up". However, that will soon be defeated (but not yet, I'm happy to report). Eventually, I will need the machine to take calls for me. For that I will probably need a system like OPs.
When it comes to telephony, the biggest issue is who pays for the call. For me it is the caller. For some (US int al) it might be the recipient. The only "cost" to me is my time to take a call.
Now, back to call centres. You want problem resolution and they want call stats. There is a bit of a disconnect. Power companies and other utilities all claim to be competitive but nearly everywhere that is bollocks.
In the UK we have privatised water companies, covering regions but how on earth can I, within the purvey of Wessex water, get my water from say Scotland. Ironically enough SSSE (one of the S is Scottish) is the local area electrical provider. I can choose my electic and gas supplier but not my water supplier. How on earth is that a free market? Well it might be but not for me, the consumer. I understand that ISP provision in the US is pretty similar to our water company situation: you have a choice of one.
So, I think, that the problem here is not the AI or the medium or whatever but something far deeper and far more entrenched.
Your shitty customer experience is because the status quo is say 50-100 years old and nothing to do with some nerdy new technology.