Are people really replacing customer service agents with LLMs? It doesn't seem practical.
Customer service handles all the things that customers aren't trusted to manage on their own with a self-service portal - that's the whole point of having a trusted human involved at all. Giving those tasks to LLMs won't work because the customer can just prompt inject their way to whatever toolcalls correspond to their desired outcome.
I had a home internet outage recently and needed the ISP to send a tech out.
Five years ago, you'd wait on-hold to talk to a human being with a script. "Is the light on your modem red?" "Try turning your modem on and off again." "OK let's schedule a technician for you."
Today I get a pre-LLM chatbot, with the same script, no waiting on-hold, available 24/7, with pictures and guides. It's somewhat faster because no human has to read the script over the phone, the words just appear instantaneously. Getting through the script tree to the outcome I want is an easy and obvious path.
The vast, vast majority of Tier 1 support is not something where the customer service agent has any agency. They have a script. Taking humans out of the loop here is an improvement.
I think they might be replacing first-tier support, the people who currently answer really stupid questions, handle really common cases, etc. When you need real support and there's no script you go to second-tier support...
As a person who aspires to actually read documentation, try common troubleshooting, google it, etc. before calling support I'd really love to go directly to second-tier, but apparently bulk of support calls are low-effort users, and now they'd get the pleasure of LLM, instead of a person, telling them to reset their router, make sure the thingie on a spray bottle is in "on" position, or call the airline.
I mentioned it before as well — I know first hand companies that have replaced most low level CS with elevenlabs + GPT ticket systems, while tracking the main metrics. Overall, it’s been better and cheaper than operating all the human agents.