Most consumers hate the idea of AI
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this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2024
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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?
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"I'm sorry you're frustrated, perhaps it's time to start a new topic.'
"I'm not going to respond to that."
"I only use my powers for good!”
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 consumption.
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.
Consumer disapproval of AI use in customer service is unlikely to keep firms from deploying the technology as the cost savings are just too great
So much for the market determining what goes
The market does determine, unfortunately the market is relatively unfazed by subpar customer service. It has to be really bad or a huge legal catastrophe before it moves the needle. Which is why phone trees and long wait times are ubiquitous despite being universally hated. Marketing and sales and having a 90+ % rate of people that don't ever feel the need to call customer service basically eliminates that bad service as a concern.
Even when asus had a famously bad customer service scandal this year, their sales continued to rise unabated.
Honestly, I've used some pretty decent AI chatbots. They can help you with basic questions and contact you with a human for things that require it or if you ask for it. Chatbots that don't let you talk to a human on the other hand, those are awful.
Honestly, I'll take anything over those outsourced call centers at this point. Half of those representatives barely speak English.
Yup. I was literally born in India, lived there until I was 7, and have an Indian mother who very much still sounds Indian, and even I struggle to understand what outsourced Indian/Pakistani call centre staff say sometimes, especially when there's background noise.
And there's almost always either background noise or a bad connection. Sometimes I go sit in my car and listen over my car speakers, which are decent speakers, and it doesn't even help.
I had to call into Fedex Worldwide's help center for an issue with a shipment on my company's account the other day, and there was so much noise in the background, the guy I was speaking with actually stopped mid sentence to tell a bunch of people behind him to be quiet, then continued on like it was a normal.
Not that it should be acceptable to happen with a retail consumer level call, but it just seemed so unprofessional for communication related to a business account.
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I think it's more "Most consumers hate the idea of a bad, unhelpful customer service".
I'm fine with AI if it was actually helping to solve my issue, but it is generally not the case.
I cannot imagine a scenario in which it comprehends my problem that I can’t just solve on their website
See: Rufus, Amazon's chatbot. I've never seen a more useless application of electrons. If it isn't already in the description then it can't help you.
If it is already in the description I don't need your shitty chatbot, Jeffrey.
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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.
My guess is you're one of the 10% or so who didn't give up in frustration. My % assumption might be off, but assuming any percentage of people gave up and walked away without costing Amazon a dime the system was working perfectly.
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These things having a clearly visible and usable button to ask for a human should be mandated by law.
Also have you tried writing "operator" to it? That may work. Sometimes.
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.
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An exceptionally well trained AI customer service has the potential to be amazing.
I only call or try to chat/email with customer service if something has gone way wrong - like outside the typical customer service capability of assistance.
If an AI can realize that my problem is human worthy and escalate it faster, that would save me time in the chat queue talking with someone who barely knows my native language.
Alas, AIs will be poorly trained, so the bad-english CS reps will still be right behind the AI interface waiting for me.
It won't. It's a glorified faq
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.
Previous way for companies to cut down on customer support costs was to make a better quality product (making support interactions rarer). That is not so much the philosophy anymore.
This is how companies that don't have competition act. This is how most companies act. We need more anti-trust enforcement.
The worst is the "in order to free up queue space, please try your call another time. Hangs up "
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It's also similar to scammers. When you are not quite certain if you've been scammed, you'll first ask. There's a percentage of cases where you won't bother for the sum, because you've used the energy on pinging them.
While in case of companies you could have used that energy to, say, post "X is crap" somewhere in the Web.
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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.
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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?
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It is now at the point where we need to ask how they plan on handling complaints and problems. And if the answer is not correct, go somewhere else. Up till now this was never something we needed to worry about
Tbf most consumers hate all customer service.
While I’d prefer to just speak to a human, I’d much prefer AI over the status quo of dead dumb automated systems that just keep looping through the same preset options until you get enraged and give up or mash zero
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Automated customer service is fine as long as your customers are also automated.
"Corporations love the idea of not paying anyone."
Would be a more useful headline. It doesn't matter what consumers want. All that matters to large corporations is what the consumer will bear.
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