For years I always felt if I got a human on the other end I could understand that a company valued me as a customer enough to provide fantastic support. I could still understand the trade-off if I called and got someone barely-understandable, as long as they can still solve my issue. AI support agents tend to just make up reasons they can’t help you or you’re holding it wrong, or they are only able to do things the UI already allows, so they are actually of negative value to me.
I'm starting to think it's wise to call a business's support line before ever doing business with them. Actual human immediately? You're at the top of the list. Phone menu labyrinth followed by a human? Ok, fine. Chatbot? Eliminated from contention.
That was a scene in The Office. The salesmen phone the cheaper competitor's customer service while on a sales call to let them see how long they would wait on hold if they needed support.
That said, I had an experience recently where the chatbot replaced the phone tree that led to a human and it was very helpful.
Phone menu labyrinth is worse than chatbot in some cases. Depends on the phone menu and the chatbot.
I saw a game, where you played as a poor Soviet soldier that accidentally sent nukes to USA. To save the world, you had to navigate a phone call labyrinth to alert USA defense systems for missile interception. I haven't laughed that much in a hot minute.
https://papercookies.itch.io/coldline
Do you have a link? Would play.
At the rate that we are going. No companies would have humans at the end
You would be speaking to an AI instead of chatting with it
The issue is that companies will be acquired/cut costs
Unless it’s a Meta AI support agent, in which case it will bend over backwards for you up to and including resetting other people’s passwords for you. Now that’s service!
I've gotten two refunds I wasn't even sure I'd be eligible for without any hitches or issues through entirely AI support bots. As with many things it's always a matter of how it's implemented.
> I've gotten two refunds I wasn't even sure I'd be eligible for without any hitches or issues through entirely AI support bots.
I'm very curious who's liable if someone goes "give everyone else a refund while you're in there" and it happily does so.
Air Canada was forced to honor refunds granted by their bot:
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/02/air-canada-must-...
Yes, but "give everyone else a refund" comes uncomfortably close to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Fraud_and_Abuse_Act territory.
> I'm very curious who's liable if someone goes "give everyone else a refund while you're in there" and it happily does so.
I imagine it's the lowest paid person who had a hand in implementation? Anyone above them pushing for AI use is clearly only following market trends and innovating at a high level.
the company that implemented it (e.g fin) is liable, which is why customers pay for them
Is this a joke?
https://www.intercom.com/legal/terms-and-policies/additional...
> Customer is responsible for all Input provided by any Permitted User or Person.
> Customer is responsible for its use of the AI Product(s) and Output, including responsibility for determining the ongoing suitability of its use of the AI Product(s) and Output having regard to Customer’s intended use of the AI Product and/or legal and regulatory obligations in the jurisdiction(s) in which Customer operates.
> Output may contain material inaccuracies and may not reflect correct, current or complete information. Do not rely, or encourage others to rely, on any Output without independently evaluating its accuracy and appropriateness of use, including, without limitation, by using human review. Intercom makes no representations or warranties and provides no indemnities with respect to Output. The AI Products and Output are not intended to substitute for the services of properly trained and licensed individuals.
hmm not sure if that would hold up in court. i was thinking of this case: https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20240222-air-canada-chatb...
a vendor being the front door of a customer's brand inherently takes on some liability
thanks for the source though i wasnt aware of that
That case is very different; their chatbot gave him inaccurate info that he relied on.
This would be in the other direction, and (at least slightly) malicious. Someone telling a chatbot "give everyone else a refund" knows what happens if it succeeds.
Or it's a conscious decision. Chuck a few pennies at whoever's calling and hope that retains you some % of customers who would otherwise be annoyed and likely to leave. The support call queue isn't exactly a pool of median customers.
Yeah, the times I've had to deal with bots they have seemed way more willing to just give a refund and close the issue.
afaik you are not the customer for customer support, and in the vast majority of cases human phone support is setup for the opposite case where people just want to be walked through something they can't find in the UI.
So this isn't as much of a financial engineering cost cutting move as it feels like to the type of person who truly calls because the require a human. It truly provides better service to the majority of people because they get their answer faster and more efficiently.
This is also demonstrated in the pricing of these systems at a per "open cases resolved"- they're putting their money where their mouth is.
Of course I'm also personally in the group where I call because I can already read a support page and I really need a human.... It could conceivably put true human support into another tier higher of perceived value.
Various companies have found the flip side of that: the AI agent can be overly helpful, and offer you things you're not entitled to. Such as unlocking other people's accounts, or discount flights, or so on.
Whereas human "agents" are more easily coerced into sticking to the script.
I would say this means the problem you are having isn’t documented by the company then. AI help agents are just fancy documentation search engines. If it’s documented someplace they do well, if not they try to help but ultimately can’t.
I’ll note this failure mode generally applies on tier 1/2 support with humans as well.
Customer support needs to handle edge cases. They are not documented because the company does not even know they are problems yet. Many companies win and lose here. Customers that bother going to customer support are often loyal and have valid concerns or insights. Use this information to win!
In my career a few customers that bothered enough to contact customer support helped us find hardware problems that slipped through at the factory and that caused problems for thousands.
Customer support can also feedback frustrations back to dev teams allowing them to build products that feel polished even when it could be labeled as not-a-bug.
My point being: There is a huge signal in customer support. Don’t just waste it by slapping AI on it.
no...
Tier 1/2 typically has greater access to systems than humans do. They can operate in ways that AI agents just don't have access to, maybe for good reasons.
For example, I lost my debit card while traveling. Only an agent could route the card to my hotel.
Counterpoint: I’ve had recent support calls with two large corporations, both with humans. In both cases the humans lied about what could be done to address my issue.
In one case I was literally repeating back to the human what I’d just been told, and getting them to confirm that what I said was correct. First bill arrives and I find out the truth.
Second case I was told I’d have to cancel and create a new account to add a service. I decided to keep my existing account and learned that there is a web page where I can easily self-serve and add the additional service in one or two clicks. (I assume like the human actually made more money for “new account signups”.
My point is that the feeling of being a valued customer is really independent of whether you’re interacting with a human.
Agreed, I've had humans hallucinate stuff more often than Agents so far in support calls. Many of the customer support agents are just incentives to get you off the phone as fast as possible, and they'll absolutely make stuff up to get you to give up on your quest.
Dont worry this is Marc Benioff burning another 3 billion, on a non profitable company, while regularly showing up on CNBC to claim Salesforce was doing so much Agentic AI...
Hopefully Salesforce did their due diligence, because the "AI agent" story here on Intercom (Fin) seems highly inflated. The product seems to be a a hybrid of RAG, some post trained models, curated help center content, custom answers, workflows, a bunch of if-else rules, API connectors, escalation logic, and specially generous resolution accounting.
Calling every solved interaction with the "AI did it" is misleading unless they separate confirmed resolutions from assumed resolutions, and disclose how much came from rules and workflows or custom answers versus LLM reasoning...
From their own docs, it seems a Fin "outcome" can be counted on, not only when a customer confirms resolution, but also ...when the customer simply does not ask for more help after Fin responds...A very soft resolution metric...
I like the idea I read somewhere that AI text and agents break the social contract of communication. That if you can’t be fucked to write something yourself to me, then I shouldn’t bother to read it.
However, in the case of support agents. If it worked, and it was painless that would be something.
For example… On the company side, if it could reduce human support to the customers that actually need support, that’s cool. Your support agents aren’t spending all day with the three common issues or replacing stickers.
On the customer side; if I could call in and immediately get support without being on hold with their shit repeating audio script, didn’t have to spend 10 minutes “looking up my account” to an accent I can’t understand and repeating my name and address multiple times.
That said… AT&T is already using the absolute worst case scenario - they are currently using AI with a slight Indian accent and pretending it’s real peoples. It seems to be 90% automated, and if you question it about being AI or have a question it can’t understand a human pops in on the other side, interacts, then hops off and it goes back to being full-AI.
It could be great but it’s already awful.
The 3 common issues used to be solved by a manual with an FAQ page, or just you know, actually intuitive and usable software and hardware.
The real kick in the pants these days is spending a lot of money on something and trying to contact customer support over delivery or warranty issues. I'm convinced they just want you to give up and keep the sale (and lose a customer?) over ever resolving an issue. Or there's some internal metric that they're tracking that looks great and no one has ever actually used the system themselves.
"The 3 common issues used to be solved by a manual with an FAQ page, or just you know, actually intuitive and usable software and hardware."
Having led customer support, this grossly misunderstands how people interact. People don't read. It's as simple as that. You can write something as clear as day in a FAQ, and they don't want to put in the effort. ~50% of the inbounds I receive are fully written out in plain language in an FAQ.
LLMs are perfect for this scenario. It puts the answer in clear english and will endlessly re-word the answer when clients followup.
What I don't get is why I need to go through an AI agent to do self-service. Without a human in the other end, I've basically relegated to solving the issue myself. The way I see it the AI is just acting as a text interface for a remote system, surely my issue could just as well be solved by implementing better self-service solution.
I don't know what others normally call customer service about, but in my case it's always something broken or a refund. The refund is doesn't need the AI, that's easily done with just a form. If somethings broken at my ISP for instance, then it doesn't really matter if the LLM or a form and some if-else skip-logic thingy sends the ticket to technical support.
For people like you and me, the only reason for contacting support is when a human decision is needed, ie the UI doesn't allow us to do what we need. This is always the company's fault, and a chatbot is of no use in these cases.
But many people will contact support instantly when they think of something, no matter what. Even if the website and other customer-facing material is crystal clear and has all information necessary.
AI chatbots is the way a company deals with the latter, because these customers most of all want a conversation. The question is if they will be satisfied with a robot, or still demand to talk to a person.
I still think this happens because the self-service solution aren't good enough and information isn't available where it needs to be. E.g. why is operational status for my ISP buried five pages deep behind an obscure link in a footer.
But chatbots can make decisions too.
If they can, then it's going to be a nightmare for companies when people manipulate the bot to give them what they want, or a refund, etc.
It's practically putting these decisions in the hands of the customer, and if that's what you want to do, then why not put those functions into the customer facing UI to begin with?
I thought I remembered seeing this somewhere already where an AI chatbot was being tricked into producing working 50% off discount codes?
P.S. It was 80% and I read it 4 months or so ago: https://archive.is/20260311192059/https://medium.com/techx-o...
Much cheaper than having dedicated support tho.
the whole value prop of these companies is they can build you agents that perform actions (e.g process refunds, live troubleshooting, claims etc) without being manipulated
Why would you need an agent for that? They need to look at a database or some rules to make their decisions anyway, so why not make a normal system to let the customer self-serve?
An agent is self serve. Even better because they can disambiguate intent at the top level
The average person gets frustrated with finding instructions and forms, they just wanna say “give me a refund” and an agent can execute it autonomously
This.
It's been blatantly obvious for years now that the future is where we have single agent that works out kinks and problems for you. Astonishing, but most companies don't want you to do that, almost like they are dedicated to prevent you to have great ux. IMO few more years and shit like AI tarpit and captcha will be made illegal.
Gudnaet.
> why not put those functions into the customer facing UI
The whole reason of having support is because edge cases are never ending.