have worked closely with customer support teams, can confirm that the goal of any technical improvements that go in front of CS agents is to reduce ticket volume, and thus costs. of course they measure retention and satisfaction but ticket volume is always the big one. chatbots were big for this long before LLMs existed.
a fun side effect is that CS is also an early warning system for companies, so when you make it harder to get through to a human, you start throwing out info on your users' pain points. of course this only matters if people have a choice about whether to use your product, so that's gotta be an upside for insurance companies, etc.
I had a fun experience with my ISP where their chat bot couldn't help me (of course it couldn't, I don't call for "did you try turning it off and on again" problems), so it escalated me to a human agent. Said human agent was very obviously copy-pasting LLM output. I could tell because (1) the responses were nearly identical to what Claude already told me when I asked it before calling and (2) every once in a while I would get an uncharacteristically brief reply, without capitalization or punctuation, in Indian English.
I haven't a had a good experience since AT&T bought my previous ISP and forced me to switch to a different subsidiary.
Can I not shop for other insurance companies? I specifically chose my provider because I know there's an office I can call to talk to my agent or his secretary. The moment I have to interact with a chatbot, I take my business to someone else.