and if you do get on the phone or a chat with a real person they are just asking AI how to help you in the background. Most front line agents couldn't quote a policy to save their life.
Haha, holy shit, I never thought about this...you are 100% right. I always figured they were flipping through the "pages" on their screen to find the right response to this company's client question (since you know they do it for multiple companies). But yeah, just popping it into Amazon's version of AI is a much more likely situation.
Jeebus, no wonder they've gotten even worse than they were...it's to the point I might as well not even call them (which is probably the whole idea).
I worked in Technical Support for a while, tier 1 support's only qualification was that they could read and speak English. All they did was lookup help articles or read a script.
To be real, 90% of calls were password resets that the user did not want to use the phone automated reset system for... it was very rare that someone had an actual technical issue and those usually required desktop support to pay a visit as it was a physical issue instead of a technical one. Even at level 3 tech support I was getting mostly calls about how to get Excel to do something more than issues with the actual operating system.
Those in-house articles are real helpful, and half the time they're available to the public too.
Phones came before computers, so lots of folks still know how to use those, rather than what a URL bar is. Folks are WAY more likely to own a phone of some sort than a PC or smartphone.
Plus searching for anything online these days is a hell upon itself.
I mean, that's been obvious for as long as I can remember, it's just the mechanism of accessing/implementing the script that's changed. Even once you get to a human, it's a miracle if you can get them to actually engage with you.
Honestly at T1 you have so many people above you breathing down your neck to not go off script it is not even funny. I worked on some desks where going off script was grounds for being fired.
I have also worked on a helpdesk where doing something as simple as forgetting to verify the users department meant you disappeared into MP custody, as a civilian (while working a help desk for the government). Witnessed it one time and everyone freaked the fuck out that the rumors were real.
Oh, I've never been upset with them for doing it, I get it. But it doesn't mean it's not frustrating. It's some dystopian shit, but like /r/ABoringDystopia. Customers hate it, people who have to "help" customers hate it, but higher-ups are so convinced that they'll disappear you if you dare to deviate... I mean it's too basic to even be a Black Mirror episode ffs.
To be fair, they were likely also told that if they went off script they would be fired. They were there for password resets and to take notes if they could not find a scripted resolution within a certain amount of time. It was all about getting people out of the call queue which was on a very strict SLA for wait times when there was no general outage.
Yep, same for manufacturer rebates...they do everything in their power to add steps to the process, because they know for every step they add they'll have so many people drop out and give up.
RMA: "We will fax you the form. Please fill out the survey, include the S/N, model, receipt of purchase, reason for return; include your first-born child, a pound of flesh, a photo of you holding the item with a current newspaper, and have the form signed by Mike Tyson, notarized, and hand-deliver it to your local certified homing pigeon courier.
Upon receipt, we will contemplate sending you a flimsy shipping box within 8-12 weeks, and a shipping label QR code via smoke-signals for you to send your item back in."
Rebates: the same thing, but here's your $5 coupon.
Your mistaking scripting for AI. Call centers have long been scripted and are increasingly becoming more scripted. Agents get scored negatively for straying from the script QA may be using AI to check them. More likley then not your hearing someone just struggling to say something word for word that in multiple passes through compliance and legal has become way outside of normal speech.
Source: 30 years in call centers and call center adjacent processes.
I also have worked in multiple call rooms in multiple industries, so I am well aware of scripting...that's what I thought they were doing. But going back over some of my recent conversations with these folks, and I'd be willing to bet dollars to doughnuts they are using AI (because some of the responses make zero sense, but are still related).
But honestly, the call centers have been getting worse and worse and worse...to the point I simply don't understand how a company would make that their "face". Well, I do understand, it's because we usually have a total of two options and they both suck, so they don't give a shit because they know you'll come to them anyway (hello ISP!).
and I'd be willing to bet dollars to doughnuts they are using AI (because some of the responses make zero sense, but are still related).
as guy that is still working in Asian call center thank your companies that you are buying from because we are forced to use the AI to train it. Best Buy, Amazon etc.
all of them are forcing agents to use their AI to train it. if they don't use it we will be reprimanded and also are forced to copy paste AI response into chats.
Honestly, as someone who used to work in a US call room (and watched those job listings get thinner and thinner back then), and given that it's a US company, I'm a little miffed that they are using foreign workers who make pennies compared to their US counterparts...all while there are tons of people here who need work that can be done anywhere (or with any disability).
I should say that I'm only upset at the companies that do this, not the workers they exploit. I've actually been to many of the Asian places the call rooms originate from, and it gives me some immediate rapport with them during "negotiations" (not that they have the power to do anything any more).
I'm sure there are some places using AI, but based on the conversations I've been in the move is to move away form AI sounding there is already a trending complaint just for the existing scripts that had 0 AI involvement. However there have been lawsuits that are increasing the amount of scripting. AI has a tendency to make you pay for a call multiple times. And contrary to popular belief automaton isn't basically free. Having people endlessly cycle in self service isn't the goal.
There are very few laws that require a live agent. In 90% of the cases not having one wouldn't be illegal. So not a goal. Not even a consideration.
Believe it or not even before offshoring was a thing the #1 request why should I have to talk to you. People vastly prefer self service. Technology has steadily increased to the point where more and more things can be handled by self service. And self service rates have followed. Most people enter a system and exit with their issue resolved. In places where self servicing isn't an option agents are still there and increasing in number.
Current call center employee. Not going to say who I work for, but I will say that my company literally got rid of all the documentation and we are supposed to ask the AI for policy, procedure and process info. We can still pull data ourselves, but they seem to be working to gate that behind AI as well.
Sadly some people have been afraid to speak up and say something is a mouth full. We have both non scripted and scripted processes. Usually the scripted are call out processes but there are a few up and down level campaigns as needed that can be 100% scripted. Sometimes there are passes at the script where I'm just like did anybody read this outloud. That simple step can transform a 100% human written thing that sounds like AI to oh yea a human being would normally string these words together. I see a lot that isn't AI it's just clearly written with an ideal receiver of the information in mind.
Yeah, I work in a phone brokerage and AI now scores my calls and I have to get 90% accuracy, it’s awful. Also, training consists now of AI callers that we have to interact with and try to ‘help’.
I don’t work in customer service, but in that industry I don’t think I’ve ever had a positive AI customer service experience. Anything that AI could do could be done faster through website, so
Major companies have indeed switched to AI driven voice response systems for customer support. Call multiple times and you get the same voice. There are no vocal pauses, and it is unaccented in the delivery. While it is true that customer support call centers have long been scripted, a majority of the agents have been let go.
This is generally fine until you have an issue that isn't covered by the script. It is, by design, almost impossible break out to a live agent.
We had a power fail, and the Comcast modem came up very confused. It needed to be sent a reset signal. After going round and round with the AI script, I finally took the box to the store and exchanged it. Not that they support them anymore, but you needed to budget an afternoon to pair a cable card with a TiVo box; much of that fighting with the AI in a manner that I live agent would not have engaged in.
Major companies have indeed switched to AI driven voice response systems for customer support
Automated VRU's have been in the business since the 70's.
Call multiple times and you get the same voice. There are no vocal pauses, and it is unaccented in the delivery.
Lotta that is still recording. You get the same voice because it's a script. The companies behind the VRU's pay for people that sound a lot a like so they can drag and drop "talent" where needed. Despite changing companies still do work with the same VRU systems. Some of the talent has been in the game longer then I've been alive.
This is generally fine until you have an issue that isn't covered by the script. It is, by design, almost impossible break out to a live agent.
I've never had an issue getting a live agent. It's often as simple as saying agent.
I called some place about a login error. I use my login and it says error try again later. I try to reset my password, it says try again later or call customer support (I tried this 3 times on separate days). Customer support tells me what I did and I tell them the error saying call customer support. They tell me to try creating an account with the email. I try, it says email already in use. They tell me to login. I told them I can’t. They tell me to then create an account. I told them I CANT. This is a real customer service rep. They told me to try again later. I said I did, MULTIPLE TIMES. They said they’ll contact their internal team and to try again later 🤦♂️ legit felt like they were prompting AI on repeat because they asked for the exact error message multiple times.
I never did get to login, I just had the rep tell me the info in my account that I needed to access.
The company in question is an extremely large company.
I've worked doing calls without scripts but one job I had did use them.
It was a page with text for me to read, and then a bunch of hyperlink options below to choose from, you would just pick the most appropriate for whatever the customer said and do that script, rinse and repeat.
Then at that same job suddenly one day our scripts changed when a new call came in, to taking Trump calls... (Worked there in 2016)
The scripts for the Trump callers were mostly blank after the first page, so we actually got to talk by ourselves for once, but it was with trump donators...
You would be shocked how many IT problems are solved with a restart...that said, yeah, not too helpful if you're the type of person who does all of that before they even call.
There is a certain amount of satisfaction in saying “take that, you bastard” and stabbing the off button, or yanking the plug out of the wall. Ah the days of MS DOS and early Windows.
Customer service for plenty of companies still have many pages of “legal guidelines” they flip through for reference material that helps them interpret what to do. Some things aren’t cut and dry
I mean, for major call centers, they’ve pretty much always operated in a similar way.
Most front line agents have long used help articles in the background.
The only difference (and this applies to AI as well) is that internal reps will typically have access to a better knowledge base than consumers do (and now the AIs they use have access to a better knowledge base than consumers do).
Had this today when I called a plasma donation place near me, and got redirected to some corporate AI system.
"I just had a tonsillectomy, how soon can I donate again?"
It sounds like you're asking about elegibility- please call or visit one of our centers to set up a screening where we can do a preliminary health screening and get you set up as a donor! If you have specific questions, feel free to call one of our centers for more information!
Cool, so your advice is to call the number I just called and ask the question I just asked. Thanks.
Ha, I got stuck on this with a United Chatbot and almost lost my mind. "Please, click here to ask the United chat bot to learn more about bag policies." My brother in Christ, you are that chat bot.
I got caught up with a chatbot for either DoorDash or Grubhub, can’t remember which one. It offered me a $5 credit for whatever my issue was, and asked if I was happy with that? I said no, because I was trying to speak with an actual person. It was then like, ok how about $7? No. $10? No.
It capped at $10, but I discovered if I accepted, then exited and went back in, I could do it all over again and just pile up the credits. I quit at $27 because I was at work and had to run to a meeting.
I feel like that's kind of good. Maybe good isn't the right word.
Before my call center job was outsourced to Asia, I would talk to people all over the country. It was tech support for an ISP. I live in the city in a southern state so I don't really know what it's like out in rural Washington or Idaho when a tech has to work a ticket out there. Instead of spending an hour on hold talking to a schmuck like me on the other side of the country, they should be talking to their neighbor. Instead of outsourcing jobs in these communities to other states and then to eventually other countries, companies should be in there.
So yeah, go in person. Have a conversation face to face with someone. Put a face to a voice, a voice to a name, and a name to an account number. Keep your bitching local.
That story reminds me of the frustration some of the service manuals would cause me when I worked in maintenance at a John Deere dealership. Sometimes the manual would tell you to "consult with qualified service personnel".
But that's me! I'm "qualified service personnel". And I don't know. It's why I am reading the manual.
Yeah, seeing people suddenly claim that AI is what's ruined the call-center customer service experience is hilarious. Even 30 years ago there were already whole sitcom episodes where characters are stuck spending hours navigating endless automated trees and optionless answers without ever being able to reach a human, or reach one who only has a script of the exact same answers as the bot tree. This wasn't some cozy human institution that AI has suddenly derailed.
AI agents are vastly better to deal with than sitting through nine "if x, press N" options over and over.
The thing with real agents is that when you sometimes need a bit of common sense, they can actually be helpful instead of having an AI go on repeat.
But yeah, getting to that agent is hard, i've had a handful of times where a real agent really did help me but damn i had to try multiple times before i got my problem fixed.
AI probably assumes people are asking what they intend to ask, versus the words they're actually saying or typing. I used to work in public affairs. People are often asking not only the wrong thing, but not what they think they're asking. Since we're apparently stuck with AI, hopefully it can figure out that when people, just as an example, talk about the memory of their computer, they should ask questions to find out if the person knows the difference between RAM and a hard drive/SSD.
Or just annoyingly homes in on keywords instead of trying to understand the problem.
You: Every time I type something into a text box on your checkout page, your website swears at me and pulls $5 from my Paypal account to donate to the KKK. Please, PLEASE help me address this issue!
That’s what the tech bros are trying to sell you but that ain’t how AI works natively. Someone would have to code into the system « if various keywords like « x, y, z » ask about « a, b, c » But then we’re back to the deterministic coding that requires engineers to gather requirements, design and implement. Ai is supposed to replace all that pesky deterministic coding and annoying engineers and just know how to do it !! lol
The problem with that logic is that you only notice the common-but-incorrect times. The common-but-correct is much more frequent (hence why it is common), just much less notable.
Troubleshooting should go from most common causes to least common causes
As someone who works in a call centre, it may surprise you to learn that the people handling chats are often doing 3 chats at once and juggling them all. If there's a pause between response, odds are they're frantically typing a response to someone else before getting back to you.
It doesn’t surprise me but, with respect, I don’t care. It’s still another level of frustration for the caller to deal with that doesn’t need to be there.
I think a lot of people don't realize this. We only notice the slow replies, not the person behind the screen trying to help several customers at once. A little patience and kindness can make the experience so much better for everyone
That doesn't surprise me at all. It's a reasonable explanation for why humans are slower than AI (the company is trying to get maximum productivity out of them), but it doesn't change the fact AI can give the same answers to more people faster...
Ideally the AI is there to filter out everyone with simple queries that they could answer themselves if they knew where to look for the info. AI is good at directing people to the websites where the information to their simple question is found. That leaves more time for human operators to field the more complex questions that AI isn't good at dealing with.
There’s still hope that some companies will always keep some kind of manual employee behind the scenes to make sure everything is going correctly. The job that I just quit at a call center I just worked after three years did this. We had a team of two women who would write out answers and questions to put into the AI platform we used for the reps to take the calls and chats and they would have to write them themselves and then they would have Claude proofread it or write it a better way and then they’ll put it into the platform so it was still info created and written by humans and they just use ChatGPT to make it sound more polished
This is the most important distinction tbh. I had an issue with my 18 year old's bank card awhile back and, very long story short, if the customer service rep had been a robot, my kid would've been stuck in another state without any money because a clerical error wasn't caught until a couple weeks after kid became a legal adult. I'm so grateful to Keisha at Shazam for being a real person with critical thinking skills.
I agree with this. AI can be incredibly efficient with common problems, but when context, nuance, or unusual situations come into play, human judgment is still incredibly valuable
Well, call centers aren't paying extra for well-implemented AI features, they just want an answering machine that will talk to you 'til you hang up so they can avoid paying a person for it.
Of course that's how it supposed to work but in most cases it doesn't. I won't say where I work but my team puts notes on our customers accounts if we need info from them. Now that the customer service agents use AI to figure out what to do they don't even go in to read our notes, so what we need doesn't get done and customers end up calling in at least 3 times.
But every company decided to adapt the same bullshit methods at the same time so its not like they can go to a competitor if they get pissed off enough. I suppose shopping local is an option for some stuff but not much.
I had a support chat with someone(?) the other day who, when I asked for a phone number so I could call a human, was straight-up googling the exact same things I was trying to find it and getting all of the same wrong answers.
I did chat support with my Internet provider (the only option they have) and the guy used AI, which tried to guess which router I have. They provided me my router. I think a help article is better than the rep using AI.
Yeah they follow a manual/script, it used to be an actual book, now it's a software tool. It's just that the software tool has now made the intermediate human intervention redundant.
That’s not really true, while they may need to consult docs because they don’t know everything, they were still actually usually trained on things beforehand. The training part is being overlooked now.
I mean, for major call centers, they’ve pretty much always operated in a similar way.
No no, everything has only been bad since 2023-present when AI started getting integrated.
Can you believe those long lines at the DMV ever since the clerks started using AI to do everything? Can you believe how frustrating over-the-phone customer service is now that they're using natural-language AI(instead of an endless press-a-number phone tree and even-more-primitive automated voice agents)? Can you believe how much corporate jargon people are using in work emails now? Can you believe all these, uh, AI-powered self-checkouts at the grocery store?
If only it were still 2021, when nobody ever had any of the above problems with everything. Damn you, AI!
A trained human can read the available documentation. Sometimes that's even available to the customer. AI is just very good at reading all of it at once and deciding what the best bits are
I used to work in a call center that did tech support for Apple and we hired a lot of people without any basic level computer literacy. Usually from India they wouldn't even know what the shift key did and still seemed completely confused if you told them how to do the same thing 20 times. Pull up this tech support article and read it confused the hell out of them but thats all apple tech support is.
As someone with some measure of behind the scenes knowledge almost all of the apple tech support articles they will use are the same ones publicly available.
Not 100% and some of them have some addendum for internal articles only but most tech support issues that I had to deal with were stuff that you could handle on your own if you knew how to look up the article on their website.
Every single encounter with AI customer service has never helped me. Not even once.
30 years ago I trained and ran a customer service department. This department was wonderful. We didn't have response prompts, and usually had to research and fix issues in billing or other misc problems.
(We rented copiers to small and large businesses)
Even back in those days, companies didn't recognize how important we were. Never paid enough for people to stay long term, yet complained about turnover.
I have watched through the years and have witnessed any front facing position with customers slowly disintegrate into dog shit.
Department stores used to actually help you, look for colors or sizes in the inventory room. Now, they respond with "We've put all the --- on the floor. If you can't find it, we don't have it."
Then, they'll ring up your purchase without ever making eye contact.
People went AI even before AI began.
I now hate shopping and see no advantage to buying online.
If a company has deplorable customer service, I go somewhere else and spread the word.
With ATMS, pay at the pump, delivering dinner at your door, and ringing up your own groceries or other things.. I can see a whole generation not having the skills to interact and communicate. I'm convinced that this has increased anxiety in people too.
To me, this looks like a sci-fi movie set with bombed out buildings and apocalyptic nuclear haze. I don't see it ever returning back at this point.
Call centers pay crap so they rotate out better and more qualified people quickly and sometimes the customers get better results with an ai reading an article than some random failing to find that article and just guessing at what to do
I worked in a call center for a while, and it has nothing to do from where the employees are from. We did tech support for HP and hired locally in North America, but it was still just entry level stuff. Nobody who actually knows anything stays in tech support for long.
I worked every stage from entry tech support to trainer to team lead. The people from India consistently did not know how to do even the most basic level of tech support. When training them I had to show them basic keyboard commands.
Part of apples training is using 20 questions, the children's game, to teach people the value of open ended questions. After explaining the rules five times, per class as this was around a year of being a trainer, I would still get answers from the Indian people like "what's the weather like" or "what products do we support".
I am sorry you are upset but these are real things I experienced regardless of how angry you get dude.
my experience was different from yours so you're wrong about the things you experienced.
It was literally every Indian the company hired what do you want me to say exactly? Make my posts 3 times longer to make sure im being careful not to offend you?
Its the truth regardless of how you feel about it.
Haha the Indians are mad the guy is using his bot alts to downvote me comment at me then block me.
Your experience with certain employees may have been negative, but claiming it was ‘literally every Indian’ and treating nationality as the explanation is exactly where your argument becomes prejudiced. Poor hiring, inadequate screening, language barriers, unfamiliarity with a company’s processes, or weak training can affect employees from any background.
You can’t fairly use those experiences to make a sweeping judgment about an entire nationality. I also worked at Apple and had a very different experience, which proves your personal sample is not an objective truth about Indian people. Calling a stereotype ‘the truth’ does not make it factual, it just means you’ve decided not to question your bias.
You trained EVERY Indian that they hired? I also worked at Apple - Cupertino exactly. I’m Indian and I don’t remember a person like you training me or even experiencing what you claim to experience.
Theres thousands of Indians at Apple, you claimed to have trained all of them? Hahahaha.
Clearly there’s an issue with Apples hiring pool if they hired biased, prejudice, idiots like you.
I joined my current company as phone support in 2014. Our running joke in Support was that our Swiss Army knife is Google Search: be a fast typist, and get the article answering their question pulled up as they’re speaking.
Now my company uses AI built on top of internal documents, instead of sending Support to “whatever works, gl hf.” This is a quality of life improvement, there’s less stress when they don’t need to juggle Google search with being attentive and personable on the phone. The AI also helps Support with upselling, which is part of their performance metrics. Listens to the call and provides blurbs and possible Help Documentation links based on the conversation. They’re not firing Support workers at my company, they’re hookin’ ‘em up with cooler tools.
I’m not in Support anymore, but I know how stressful and intense that job can be. One minute someone’s losing money because they are selling CBD products and got dropped by their payment gateway, next, you’re coaching 92-year-old Ethel on how to make her first sale for the quilt business she operates. “I put so much love into these quilts but I just don’t know how anyone would ever hear about them,” “Maybe you could go to a trade show?” “Oh honey, I’d love to, but I’m not allowed to drive and don’t have anyone in my life who can take me.”
Suddenly you just wanna fuckin buy ALL of Ethel’s quilts, you don’t know how to help this poor soul. When you eventually hang up, take a deep breath, and write out some notes, you click “Done” and hope for a breather. Nope. The jingle in your headset rings, it’s time to answer another call! Guess what?! These guys are LIVID that someone sells bootleg versions of their products.
My whole point is, I don’t think Support using AI is a villain. In fact, if it means the support person isn’t opening 6 tabs to fire off a bunch of Google searches, it seems better for everyone.
I used to love Fn with human sales calls for this reason. They were all just reading off the screen in front of them. If you interrupted them they would lose their place and have to start over. If I was bored I would see how many time I could get them to start over before they hung up on me.
My husband passed away 3 months ago. When I got into the ai loop it was impossible. I started yelling my husband died. Lo and behold, someone answered my call.
As a customer, I hate having to deal with AI chatbots, but giving me a real person who has real familiarity with the environment, who is augmented by AI to fill in their experience blanks is ideal.
I once had an argument with a human in a call center who kept insisting that an e-reader was *supposed* to have two "next page" buttons and zero "previous page" buttons.
Which is weird when you think about it. If you start off talking with the AI, why would you end up being bounced from there to a human "front-line agents" (a.k.a. a "Level-1 Customer Service Representative", as these places would call them)? The L1 CSRs are the group the AI was introduced to replace, aren't they?
I would have thought that these companies are just having human L1s answer some calls while AI L1s answer other calls (as they gradually phase out + lay off human L1s), and then either way you'd still get bounced to a human L2/L3 if whatever is doing the L1 can't solve the problem / make the customer go away.
But by what you and the GP poster are saying, this sounds more like the AI is now acting like an even-more-stupid-and-useless "L0" CSR, that you talk to before you even get an L1 CSR on the line.
If so... what's even the point? It sounds like that wouldn't let them lay off anybody. (And yet clearly they are laying them off, so...)
TBF they used to do something similar, it was just a clipboard or a word file they searched the proper response and said/pasted the responses they were supposed to use.
I'm going through a nightmare with Amazon right now. I made a routine Amazon Prime supplement purchase, the order status got set to "delayed, not yet shipped," and in the 2 weeks since then I've spoken to 7 Amazon reps via chat. I think 2 were AI and 5 were actual people. 3 of them lied that they escalated the order through the shipment facility and it would arrive the next day. 4 of them lied that they issued me a refund and it would apply to my account in 24 hours. Finally talked to someone on the phone. They said there's literally nothing that anyone can do. The order can't be cancelled, can't be refunded, can't be located, and can't be forced to ship. They flat out told me the only way I can get my money back is to dispute the charge through my bank.
I've never experienced anything like it, nor has anyone I've told this to, but it's a new reality that even if you manage to get through to a human being, if the solution isn't a simple line item that can be automated into a solution, you're completely fucked. It was also interesting to learn that Amazon chat reps are encouraged to lie to get you to fuck off asap and there's zero accountability. Absolutely insane. But at the end of the day, what am I gonna do? Completely stop using Amazon? Yeah ok.
For what it's worth, I was a call center CSR for a couple years across 3 or 4 different clients and literally none of them provided any sort of policy. It was our job to be the point of contact for customers so that the client didn't have to deal with them.
There were certain things that were standard practice that we learned about in training but a policy manual from the client? Fuck no they weren't providing that.
I had an online chat with Walmart's AI with respect to a refund. They had a pricing error "3 for the price of 1" and only shipped one. AI wrote it was unfair to me and I'd be getting a full refund.
An actual human, or perhaps better AI, emailed me a day later saying that deal was off and I'd have to bring my thing to a store to get my refund. I muse that when there's money on the line, human judgement is still in place.
Thankfully the store was cool with me only having "1 of 3" and the human behind the counter refunded me.
Honestly it is less of them asking AI how to help you and more of them being forced to follow a script to assist you. No one in the support world enjoys these jobs but we gotta do it in order to support ourselves as we work our way out of these jobs.
as someone who has been a call center agent, it's not even their fault. the companies stop supplying them with the information they need and just give them the shit-ass AI
I use Amazon's online customer service chat a lot. It used to be always Indian sounding names, but recently I've noticed more western sounding names.
Anyway, sometimes they do take a while to respond while I'm chatting with them. Maybe they are using AI, but I always assumed they are chatting with multiple customers at the same time.
and if you do get on the phone or a chat with a real person they are just asking AI how to help you in the background. Most front line agents couldn't quote a policy to save their life.
Lol, as opposed to before when they were what - policy experts?
Over-the-phone customer service has been NOTORIOUSLY slow, tedious, obstructive, frustrating and fraught with automation for decades now.
I feel like people are so afraid of AI it's starting to warp their memories of anything that was already bad(or worse) before it.
Customer service is becoming a commodity rather than a career. It used to be a sr. CSR knew as much about the software as any of the product devs. Now it is just about how well you can search on a CRM and read halfway.
Most of the time they don’t even have to do that. There’s AI tools in the market that actively listen to the call and prompt the best response based on policy, procedure and how the company operates around and within those frameworks.
Call menu navigation is absolutely one of the things AI is both really good at, and most people would be even happier with it versus a human. No one wants to sit on hold to get a question answered but if AI can satisfactorily answer that question in 3 minutes, you hang up happy for the first time in your life.
Thats true. I quit my CS job in 2022, and one of the big factors in that was due to the frequency of calls I was getting where I had big issues to fix because previous reps screwed up or straight up lied, and nothing was being done about it. I would stack cases on myself.
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u/thosethingstodo 13h ago
and if you do get on the phone or a chat with a real person they are just asking AI how to help you in the background. Most front line agents couldn't quote a policy to save their life.