Ask HN: Will low quality AI customer support be the new normal?

00-bad-sectors about 4 hours ago 8 comments

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Now whenever I reach for customer's support chat or phone I get an AI agent replying to me and I get into a useless loop for a couple of minutes before I start begging it to link me to a real person.

Will companies start losing customers because of that or people will eventually get used to this?

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Discussion (8 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

keane•about 1 hour ago

The real fun one is calling the utility company to report a downed line from a pole snapped in half and the bot agent doesn’t transfer you to a human even when you say “emergency”, “public hazard”, “utility pole obstructing a roadway”, “potential property damage your corporation will be liable for”, “immenient danger to life and limb” or any and all applicable keyword variations that might warrant humanly answering (and, to add insult to injury, cannot take a report of the event either but simply ends 10 of your calls in a row with a texted link to livechat with its textbot sibling). Like +−×÷ says nearby, it’s austerity.

ex-aws-dude•30 minutes ago

It’s part of the continual squeeze of more water out of the same rock

Something that was table stakes in the past would now be seen as crazy for a company to spend money on

Leynos•about 3 hours ago

Voice agents are a royal pita. They have trouble with any kind of British regional accent, they are tiny models because anything usable is too slow, and they have zero capability because they'd probably mangle the toolcalls anyway.

Elevenlabs using a completely incapable voice agent for sales outreach made me wonder if they were actively trying to dissuade customers.

It feels like the sort of thing a disinterested engineer implemented to appease a manager fixated on the shiny.

Jeremy1026•25 minutes ago

Until it either gets good, or consumers revolt against it.

cheese_van•about 2 hours ago

It seems that low quality human customer support, or rather, no support at all, has been normal for some time. I don't enjoy talking to an AI, but if they are constructed to be efficiently helpful, I welcome it, grudgingly.

threecheese•about 1 hour ago

Almost every “call tree” I’ve needed to navigate has seemed designed to prevent customer escalation to a human at all costs, despite not meeting my needs as a caller. In this way they are user hostile, and I expect the new technology to be used similarly to much greater effect.

That being said, if the technology can remove the need for human escalation, I’ll certainly change my view.

palguna26•about 4 hours ago

I believe customer support should actually be done by humans, as customers feel undervalued when they talk to scrappy voice agents, atleast make an effort to use good ones, so it tries to speak like humans

add-sub-mul-div•about 1 hour ago

AI is essentially austerity. We're going to get synthetic/inferior versions of many products and services, wherever using AI can make them cheaper to produce. Companies no longer fear losing customers because customers have proven so passive and docile as these forces have already started to accelerate over the last decade.