Comment by SpicyLemonZest
15 hours ago
I'm surprised to find so many people who consider human-based customer support a good experience. I wasted an hour on the phone last month with a series of polite support agents who I'm sure were wonderful people in their personal lives. They kept saying they'd like to try one more thing, making me wait 5 minutes (just short enough that I can't get anything done in the interim!), and then asking for one more pointless permutation of the workflow that did not work because their website was not showing me a button the support scripts said should be there. Talking to an LLM would have let me realize a lot faster that we weren't getting anywhere.
This happened to me when I tried to buy Oakley’s, it was because I’d changed my router to an ad blocking DNS which made their support session lookups fail, so they couldn’t help me. Transactions failing, all because of their site being too tightly integrated into tracking and ad platforms. I ended up going with Zenni and got similar glasses for 1/5 the price.
> because their website was not showing me a button the support scripts said should be there.
At that point, it's effectively a phone tree executed by a human. Colloquially, human-based support means getting a hold of someone who knows how to solve problems, and worst case, knowing who to contact to solve the problem. That means employees who know their worth which unfortunately, businesses do not want to pay.
there are many human customer support systems where the goal is to frustrate you into saying something to make them hang up, or make you give up.
good, human customer service is a big margin my current company eats our competitors alive on