Comment by janderson215
7 hours ago
I see a lot of negativity in regards to using AI as a customer service agent. I have only spoken with 1 and that was calling Starlink customer support. It was easily better than 95% of customer support experiences I’ve had. My guess is the bad experiences have to do with bad execution. I’m sure some companies think they can just plug in AI and their job is done. Obviously that is wrong, but done right, the experience is far better than the situation we have today. I never have to repeat myself and if it’s tied in with your account specifically, it’s like getting escalated to a level 3 support rep immediately.
Yeah, I think AI support is great for those low effort calls where someone wants something simple and clear and company policy is set up to just give it to them. That’s why a lot of people like Amazon’s bot, it has direct access to account details and can auto-approve simple things like a return that is slightly outside the return window etc…
But what you shouldn’t do is try to dress up adversarial policies behind a friendly customer service bot and then fire your entire support staff. That is immediately obvious and will drive people bonkers.
It seems trivial to be upfront that its AI and for routine tasks only.
If a firm is so deceptive that they cant even do that, then they probably are deceptive in other ways too.
So its kind of a useful signal, ironically, for who not to do business with.
It's all about the execution. Most of our customer's prefer AI (per their feedback, so there is some selection bias) since they can get quick responses 24/7 rather than wait. That said there are still many cases where you need human intervention and it can be frustrating to have to get through the AI first (my experience with Stripe's AI support).
My last customer service call was fast (connection time) and friendly. The person wasn't sure so she said "let me ask my colleague $female-first-name" and I heard her typing. "Is $female-first-name an AI chat bot?" Yes, it was, and then she read out a whole answer, an excerpt that's already on the website. In this case the person added little extra value and I guess will be replaced soon.
>My guess is the bad experiences have to do with bad execution.
This is the key, IMHO. I have not been able to access my Coinbase account for some time due to a login issue. (No error is displayed, but a successful login returns me to the login screen). The AI driven phone agent was actually very good at working through the problem, but there was no escalation to a human after that. When the agent couldn't solve my problem, it told me to mail a physical letter describing my issue to an address on 5th Ave in NYC.
Starlink's AI customer service agent confidently gave me incorrect information about shipping time estimates. It would have been better to have no answer at all than to have a broken promise.
I’m not affiliated with Starlink nor trying to defend them, but I would argue the shipping estimate comes from a black box and is totally unrelated to the AI agent. My shipping estimate in the app said expected to ship between June 22 and July 2, but it’s actually arriving tomorrow. I’m happy with it in my case, it I could understand if coming outside of the window (either early or late) is frustrating.
If there is something that can be done without human approval, I don't want to call support to do it. I want to be able to do it myself on the company's website. I only ever want to call support if I want something that I think is going to be outside of the usual policy, if that makes sense.
So instead of companies working on their AI support execution, I wish they would just work on their website.
Can someone give me examples of the kind of support they want from a company that could be provided by AI, but could not be better provided by a well designed app and/or site?
+1
its surprising to HN tech crowd but a well implemented support agent gets higher reviews and successful resolutions than humans
Can you cite a source or study for your assertion?
personal info
maybe will be public soon with earnings calls? We’ll see!
Are frustrated hangups before any resolution is reached a part of that data?
yes, it counts as unresolved
c'mon listen to yourself
I’ve also really enjoyed Amazons support agent. Sometimes it can be really helpful.
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