It’s been a couple decades since I worked in a call center (tech support).
Are they still dominated by shitty ticketing systems that employees are expected to fill out while being on the call? I don’t know if that was just an oddity of the call center I worked for or not. If I didn’t fill out a ticket correctly we wouldn’t get paid for the tech support, so management would get real upset if you didn’t fill out a ticket correctly. There were like 400 fields to fill out in a ticket and you had to fill out about 15 of them just right; fill out one too many, or one too few, or the wrong one and management is upset.
Honestly, language models would do better filling out those tickets than they would handling the call. If an AI can’t fill out the ticket, how can it solve an actual problem? It would sure make life for the call center employees better if all they had to do was talk instead of managing a bunch of tickets and paperwork using shitty internal apps. But who am I kidding. They’ll probably find a way to make life worse for the customers and the call center employees and they’ll make a profit, because that’s how free markets work, right? Whoever makes life worse for everyone prospers.
I am with you. We should use the ai as a tool to automate or remove things that is frustrating or in the way of the actual goal to help the customers. Plus I don’t think any model is good enough (yet) to act as tech support (they can use open ai if it was enough). I think ai is great as a tool tho. For example you can use it to go through a lot of documents of products, policies, other tickets and so on so the tech support person can find the relevant information faster. We can also use ai to create summerise of the call or take notes and so on. A lot of great potential to make everyone happier but I don’t believe in replacing actual ppl.
Wait until generative AI tells a customer to touch electricity.
Idk— Tesla directed autopilot to disengage the moment before a crash, to ensure that the driver was held responsible. I sadly doubt any corpo would pay for its mistake
It’s plausible, but a quick DuckDuckGo didn’t find anything about this. Do you have a reference?
Or that they can buy the plane ticket first, then apply for the grievance discount later…
https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2024/02/18/air-canada-airline-chatbot-ruling/
An Air Canada spokesperson said in a statement to The Washington Post that the airline will comply with the tribunal’s decision.
The most shocking part
Pretty sure a court told them to.
Usually the next step is “nuh-uh” followed by an appeal.
Someone with an expensive calculator probably worked out that it would be more expensive to fight this and just allow it.
Someone expensive with a calculator
The rare sort of Engineer who took classes in Finance and Statistical Analytics who can work out a past-present-future cash flow diagram on a whiteboard in like 5min because he never uses the compound interest factor tables and instead memorized the formulas.
I work for a company that is “all in” on AI. And offshoring. But AI is unlikely to provide second or third level support for complex and poorly documented software that operates at the intersection of legislation and rule making.
Add to that, customers who are licensed in their field but cannot comprehend that software implementation of paper forms requires the same inputs generally, much less explain their objective…
Also, the implementations I’ve been presented with as a consumer have been hot garbage.
The front line folks who exist primarily so customers can yell at someone might be in trouble. But companies who put their people in that position are shit anyway.
It’s a soul destroying job anyway.
It’s already in the works. We leverage genrative AI via a chat bot in our internal ticketing system for ticket deflection and we’re currently rolling out a similar feature for external customers as well. This goes well beyond simply linking high level FAQs. The bot asks a series of questions based on the issue and goes through the same line of questions our service desk reps ask to help diagnose and resolve the issue. And if they go through the entire T1 process within a minute or so and don’t have an answer, it creates a ticket for the appropriate team based off of whatever platform, app, or website the issue is in regards to.
It’s crazy scalable and has allowed multiple teams to shift focus towards more project oriented work. Without it we probably would have hired more service desk reps as the company grew
We still get some internal customers that just mindlessly click through it or slack us directly but that’s the joy of IT.
Will the AI not hang up on me when I ask it a question that’s going to take a long time to resolve and fuck up it’s service metrics?
I’ve gone through like 3 service reps in a single problem because the call mysteriously drops after I outline the issue. “Could you hold please?” — click
I promise you 1) this real-world event will fail to be scrubbed from the training data & 2) it will be regurgitated as a valid event that saves the company money.
So yes. That will happen again :/
Dammit, you probably aren’t wrong…
We’re doomed.
Dammit, you probably aren’t wrong either.
We should instead be using AI to decimate the CEO industry.
Well, the world is your oyster… Can’t wait for yout chief automated officer.
edit: There was a similar hype back in the blockchain era, where people were trying to build decentralized organizations by making all the shareholders directly vote on every decision. Let’s just say this model wasn’t especially successful except for very rare circumstances.
Good, fuck call centers. Make sure the societal benefit is captured via tax
First of all, it will make cold calling way, way worse. Time to ramp up restrictions, fines and other penalties for that kind of stuff.
When it comes to tech support call centers, some may actually improve. Not because the technology is so superior, but just because the current support simply sucks, and any change would be an improvement. And then they must actually work, i.e. solve the customers problems. On top of that, there is that case where an AI call center made expensive promises (IIRC if promised a car for $1 or something like that), and the judge made the company uphold this deal.
AI: what do you need
Me: Talk to a human
AI: okay, so I can help get the right help what specifically do you need?
Me: to talk to a human
ad infinitum
Me: divide by 0
Ai: OK you are the new CEO. Which sales slates would you like to run next week?
I think they should start with decimating the CEO industry
But we’re supposed to be training AI to be smarter, not dumber.
Of all the things that should decimate call centers…
really hope so - my work’s ServiceDesk is based in India and they’re barely functional - nothing gets fixed until the problem gets passed to an American IT person.
I will not be shedding a tear if people no longer have to work in such a soul crushing menial job. Fuck around and findout what happens millions of people lose their jobs all at once.
but anyway this is just some more ai hype stock manipulation shit.
I work for the largest contact center tech firm, and I’m sure it won’t be this year. There are major issues to be solved. The companies that acted first had cars sold for $1, entirely new offers made up that they had to honor, and their bots made poems full of swear words about how shitty their companies were. I’m not sure how long it will take for gen ai to take over but some major issues need to be solved first and I don’t see much progress being made on those.
Ahh, laziness, impatience, and hubris! This is hilarious (“if true”, obv) & 100% unsurprising
