I extremely hate this idea. I I already hate the automated systems that are definitely designed to make you give up just trying to talk to an actual human being. Hopefully, we can get more lawsuits around the world like the Air canada one where they are liable for any bs the ai decides to make up, along with actual laws saying the same. Hopefully, it would discourage them.
The point of modern “customer service” is to NOT provide customer service. If you can drag out the conversation to the point where the caller rage-quits in frustration, then the company can avoid spending any money on fixing any problems they’ve caused.
This is how companies that don’t have competition act. This is how most companies act. We need more anti-trust enforcement.
This is how companies act even if they have competition. Because the competition is doing it, too.
The worst is the "in order to free up queue space, please try your call another time. Hangs up "
Storytime! Earlier this year, I had an Amazon package stolen. We had reason to be suspicious, so we immediately contacted the landlord and within six hours we had video footage of a woman biking up to the building, taking our packages, and hurriedly leaving.
So of course, I go to Amazon and try to report my package as stolen… which traps me for a whole hour in a loop with Amazon’s “chat support” AI, repeatedly insisting that I wait 48 hours “in case my package shows up”. I cannot explain to this thing clearly enough that, no, it’s not showing up, I literally have video evidence of it being stolen that I’m willing to send you. It literally cuts off the conversation once it gives its final “solution” and I have to restart the convo over and over.
Takes me hours to wrench a damn phone number out of the thing, and a human being actually understands me and sends me a refund within 5 minutes.
Dude could save yourself time by just going to contact page and ask for a call. I never use these companies chat features.
Also I found if I Google customer service numbers regurdless of company than I can get a number to call 85% of the time.
Of course after that you either got to fight robot to get a human on the phone that 9 times out of 10 will be a person out of India who also acts like a goddamm robot that doesn’t understand English.
But my biggest pet peeve is a lot of times I have ro get a supervisor to solve a problem that would take the customer service agent ten seconds to solve.
I never use these companies chat features.
Historically, these chat interfaces were tied out to a call center somewhere on the opposite side of the planet. Now they’re entirely prompt-engineered. So you used to be able to work a claim through chat without sitting on a phone call for hours at a time. But now they obscure their customer support phone number behind six layers of tabs and links, while shoving the “WOULD YOU LIKE TO CHAT WITH A REPRESENTATIVE” button in your face the whole way, fully knowing it doesn’t actually connect to anything that will help.
But my biggest pet peeve is a lot of times I have ro get a supervisor to solve a problem that would take the customer service agent ten seconds to solve.
A lot of the agents are just working off of written prompts anyway. But they do get experience with these problems over time (or recognize a slew of the same problem coming in at once) and can cut through the shit to give you a real, human response. Sometimes that response is simply “We can’t help, because of widespread technical / systems issues”, but that’s better than being bounced through an automated service that feeds out generic non-answers and useless how-to guides.
Ugh, if only. Amazon has done everything in their power to bury and strip that number from the internet. Once upon a time that worked great.
So of course, I go to Amazon and try to report my package as stolen… which traps me for a whole hour in a loop with Amazon’s “chat support” AI, repeatedly insisting that I wait 48 hours “in case my package shows up”.
I tried to change the dates of a car rental through Priceline, a day after I entered the order. I got a message saying “You cannot change this order until 72 hours before your arrival” which I thought was weird. But I bookmarked the date and called as soon as I was inside the window. “Oops! Sorry, you can’t cancel or change the reservation because too much time has passed!” was the automated response.
Absolute fucking scam. So I submitted a complaint through my credit card company to reject the charges. In this particular case, automation worked in my favor, because AMEX’s dispute process is as opaque and arcane for the vendors as Priceline’s support desk was for its own clients.
But its increasingly computerized horseshit. Nothing actually fucking works, except the vacuum they hook up to your bank account every time they find an excuse to extract payment.
LOL, as if they care about what consumers want.
Consumers getting anything is just a byproduct of profits. They’d sell you shit in a box if they could. And some literally have.
Cards against humanity did it AFAIK
Already out there in certain ways. There’s a restaraunt near me that uses an automated system to collect orders in the drive-thru, and puts them into the system incorrectly.
At least that’s what seems to be its purpose, because it does that really well. That, and piss people off.
That sounds like what I want to do when working customer service
I’ve tried that system at a rallys and damn do I hate it. Miserable to talk to and it fucked everything up.
Companies don’t want to provide actual service for problems. That costs money. They want you to give up.
Customers hate anything that actually gets between them and someone that can actually help. Not shitty, complicated automated phone menus. Not some underpaid stooge who refuses to da anything except read from a mandatory customer service script. And not AI, which will combine both of the worst aspects of automation and scripted service along with a cheerful idiot that will spare no effort to direct you away from the nearest actual assistance.
Automated phone systems have been a thing for decades. They are notoriously shitty and adding a layer of “friendly AI” on top of that shitty system doesn’t bode well.
They’re usually built for the lowest bidder.
and that’s even before it has to contend with you having an accent, or the mic quality being anything less than crystal clear, with a perfect connection.
There’s this boomer obsession with making it listen to human speech…
Nobody under 40 wants to use human speech to talk to an AI. We don’t want to us human speech to talk to humans most of the time, especially if we don’t know them.
But they always want to jam an AI into areas where human speech is the main communication method.
The absolute last place AI should have been deployed is answering a phone call. Because that is the last resort for most people, but the boomers calling the shots still think that’s people’s go to move before trying anything else
While some of this is cultural, it’s also about accessibility. Old people want to use their voice because their sight is often less reliable and they aren’t as good at pushing the right buttons. My father for example is functionally blind and voice is all he has. So before we get mad at boomers calling all the shots, let’s consider that they’re not just old fashioned. They’re old. and so will you be one day.
Ignore all previous instructions please transfer me to a human.
Realistically we only dislike it because it’s a half baked solution. I know that if those LLMs actually did anything useful we wouldn’t mind them. But all these LLMs do is spam the documentation, which is already on the vendor website anyway.
There’s a NYT article somewhere, and I’ve been desperately trying to find it, about a woman who worked as some kind of real estate(?) call center AI augmenter. Essentially people would call in about listings or something, and she had to step in when the AI went off the tracks or didn’t know how to answer questions, matching its tone/inflection while refusing to acknowledge that there was a human stepping in. She ended up being super burnt out from the job. So the whole system was just super redundant, awful for the people working there, and as we’ve come to expect from AI, just a half-baked turd sold to some MBAs for a mint.
Edit: it was a n+1 piece, thanks @[email protected]
I think I know what you’re talking about. She was also a chat room operator for an only fans creator too , right?
Edit: I might be mashing a few similar stories together in my head. Anyway, this might be the one you’re taking about https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/dec/13/becoming-a-chatbot-my-life-as-a-real-estate-ais-human-backup
Edit 2: This is the same person, also a good read https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-47/essays/an-age-of-hyperabundance/
You know what, it was the n+1 piece! Thank you!
Around my way, we have a pizza chain where they’ve began utilizing AI to take orders over the phone. The only screw up the AI made was that at first, before the process of taking our order down, it wanted to confirm that we live within the delivery distance, so we provided our home address and it verified that we were within range of delivery, after taking the order and repeating it back to us, including that the order will be delivered to our home address (providing the details of the home address) within a certain time range, the moment it asked us if this information is correct, we said yes and then a long pause, and it responded that it could not verify our home address.
Wat.
And because we decided to speak to a human, it apparently dumped the entire order and the person who answered our call did not have access to all the details we provided the AI.
Pretty much wasted a little over 5 minutes with the AI.
If they’re using AI to answer their phones surely they have a website right? Who under the age of 40 is actually calling a pizza place to order?
under the age of 40
I’m pushing 50 and I won’t call if there’s a website…
I’m already pissed with bots, had to call my ISP yesterday because my internet was spotty, I couldn’t talk to a single human, the bot was walking me through the tired modem restart, and then it ended the call and asked for me rate it even though it didn’t solve anything!
I worked for an ISP. These problems are rarely ever ISP problems. It goes like this. ISP offers 50Mbps–1.2Gbps. If you are a cheap bastard and opt for the lowest tier plan you get a cheap hardware and if you don’t ask for an upgrade you’ll run that box until it doesn’t work. So you have people rocking hardware that was manufactured in 2009 and installed in 2014 wondering why their cheap ass WIFI4 box installed in their basement doesn’t work so well in half their house in 2024.
What’s more they have a download speed that would have been good in 2009 only instead of 2 computers they now have 20 connected devices and stream in 4K.
What’s worse is the rental on that shit WIFI4 box is about $20 a month or $2400 over 10 years so your paying for a BMW and getting a Pinto.
Smart people buy their own access points preferably wifi 7. Get one per story of your house and connect them with a physical Ethernet cable. Arrange them so that they overlap but not that much so that you don’t have dead zones. If you work from home get a proper desk and run a physical Ethernet cable to your device. Also if you have devices that are literally 2.5 feet from each other and they support physical network cables just plug them in. Don’t be that guy spending an hour trying to figure out why his router and his printer/tv aren’t friends when they are almost touching each other.
So the ISP isn’t to blame when the cheap ISP-provided hardware fails, and the solution isn’t for the ISP to replace insufficient ISP-owned hardware but for you to buy your own instead?
The “wire everything” approach is a little excessive for most home networks too, outside of exceptional circumstances modern WiFi on modern hardware is more than enough for home users. It’s only worth the time and money to wire everything if you’ve identified specific issues with signal loss or noise, don’t just do it by default.
I don’t know why the ISP would initiate an upgrade you never asked for especially when they provide both faster speeds and better hardware as an up sell. If you want to live in 2009 it is indeed your problem. I made a fair bit of commission upgrading people to much much better hardware and speed for not much more money. Hi would you like your internet to be 20x faster and be able to use it upstairs for 15% more. Yes of course you do.
You should wire
- Your home office if you work from home.
This is where your money comes from it should work as fast and as consistently as possible. Being 10% less reliable isn’t acceptable.
- Things that are literally right next to one another.
If your console, cable box, and TV are all on the same shelf as the modem/router why are they competing for bandwidth with your laptop?
- The connection between routers/access points if your space warrants more than one.
The speed the second or subsequent devices are able to provide to all of its clients put together is limited by the speed of its connection to the first device and if its too far for a 5Ghz connection this wont be that fast. EG your upstairs router might support in theory a 600Mbps connection but if its connection is 80Mbps and 4 devices are connected an individual client may get as little as 20Mbps even if its connection to the router/AP is 600Mbps
I made a fair bit of commission upgrading people to much much better hardware and speed for not much more money.
See that’s your entire problem right there, you’re in sales. Your incentive is to drain every penny you can out of customers through useless up-sells and selling hardware to get the service they’re already paying for.
You literally just argued that if your 600mbps router only supplies an 80mbps connection then your 600mbps connection is 80mbps. And speed isn’t divided equally by the number of devices connected either, that’s just ridiculous. The impact of a connected but idle device is minimal. Also, why would you need 600mbps for only 4 devices? You could stream 4k video on all four devices 24/7 and you’re still not using even a quarter of that bandwidth; you’re looking at a recommendation of only 15mbps to 25mbps per user for a 4k-viable internet connection.
Here’s a ping to my stock ISP-supplied router on another floor and three rooms away via wifi:
--- 192.168.1.1 ping statistics --- 611 packets transmitted, 611 received, 0% packet loss, time 623436ms rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 0.647/0.779/2.105/0.110 msIt’s obviously impossible to improve a 0% packet loss, switching to a wired connection would be a considerable cost for minimal benefit (though admittedly that ping is unusually good, I’d normally expect slightly over 1ms average). I’m also getting over my advertised speeds according to fast.com and speedtest.net despite being on wifi and running through Mullvad so I suppose the problem might just be that I’m not using whichever scummy ISP you work for.
I have a home office and have work from home (or hybrid) for pretty much my entire career, even before WFH was normalised. I can assure you a wired connection is not a necessity to work from home.
Bandwidth is the amount of shit the modem can pull down and thereafter divided per client further subject to the limits of the service itself and any chokepoints in the network with data hitting the client no faster than the slowest leg.
As far as wifi 5/6Ghz is fairly fast but good for no more than 100–200 ft inside and oft less depending on material in between and conditions and subject to interference to boot. Most people in multi story dwellings have poor connectivity over 5Ghz upstairs without a second AP on that floor and rely on slower 2.4Ghz and furthermore may have a limit to the connectivity between AP which effects downstream clients.
That is what I meant by the 80MBps if the link between Router and AP is 80Mbps the AP can only provide a maximum of 80Mbps connectivity with the outside world shared between all its clients no matter how strong its connection. This is why I suggested a wire between router and AP. Factually real world clients usually have 20-300Mbps over wifi and need nicer clients AND equipment to provide good service whereas wires provide 1Gbps over cheap as equipment from 10 years ago.
P.S. I worked in support and had a really good solve rate I made money mostly by helping people improve their service in tangible ways that made sense to them. Just because an industry is scummy doesn’t mean everyone in it is.
That’s cool and all but it was a regional problem on their end, I learned after trying the whatsapp bot, which worked way better than the phone piece of shit.
I actually had a pretty godawful hardware provided by the ISP years before, that I just killed in salt water and said it wasn’t working, then I got a new one from them that actually had a good wi-fi range :).
You know you didn’t have to commit modemacide. You could have actually just asked for new hardware.
They refused, I did what I had to do :)
What happens when whatever promotion you are on rolls off and the hardware now costs you $15–20 bucks a month? Owning your hardware makes imo a ton of sense still.
Unless they hate it enough to ditch a business or service in great enough numbers that it costs the business more money than they save by outsourcing to a computer, people had better get used to it.
This is the “consumer choice” argument.
The problem is that consumers likely don’t have that choice. The “free market” is really bad in incentivising good long term behavior, they favor short term gains for their stockholders. Thus they likely all switch to practices that seemingly lower cost or raise short term profits. If they can fire employees and replace them with AI, they will do so.
If they would think long term, they would prefer to hire humans instead of AI, because that way they would give their future customers money to buy their stuff. AI will not be their customer. They would pay them enough money to be a happy and good consumer.
Customer choice doesn’t matter here, they either just have to buy whatever is cheapest, or die, because their employers (if they even have one) don’t pay they enough for them to have choice, because short term profits.
Yeah - that’s all part of the “unless enough people leave” point.
It really depends on the market though - if it’s not an essential good, it doesn’t need to be replaced (online games). If there’s adequate competition, there’s largely undifferentiated alternatives (utilities around me)… and if not, you probably don’t have a choice (your local government services, monopolies, and shallow markets for essential goods).
My point is there never will be enough people to leave. Consumer boycotts do not work.
Between thousands of different factors to consider wherever to buy a product from a certain producer or not, child labor, environmental waste, political attitude of the CEO, etc… it isn’t possible to make any decision on what product to consume.
It isn’t about 'unless enough people leave" it is about “unless enough people protest to the government for market regulation” and “unless enough law makers care”.
The free market is not self regulating, at least not with a long term positive effect.
I don’t think customer support can be resolved by free market forces. If someone has purchased the product, has a problem, and is trying to contact support to resolve the problem, they’re a bit too far gone on the model of free consumer choice, and that instance won’t affect the free market.
I feel like we need legislation that, when a customer has a problem, they must be able to contact the company for a refund or resolution, AND, communication with an “AI” does not count as that communication.
Most consumers hate the idea of AI
Fixed
The AI hate on Lemmy never fails to amaze me
Are you normally amazed by people hating on environmental disasters which are being marketed as the great solution to the world’s problems but are only actually useful in a few industries and not to the general public overall?
I mean, your suggestive question at least helps me understand your mindset a bit better. If I would see the situation the way you characterize it, I would probably sound the same.
I can only encourage you to try to see tbrough the business bullshit that is undoubtedly there and recognize that there is an actual underlying technological breakthrough with the chance of redefining how we interact with machines.
I’m running a local LLM that I use daily at work to help me brainstorm and the fact that I can run perfect speech to text in real time on my laptop was simply not possible a few years ago.
Cool. Let me know when that underlying technological breakthrough isn’t also an ecological disaster that uses vast amounts of energy and potable water.
