The other day I was able to take care of what I thought was a reasonably complicated customer service issue through an automated assistant.
I take a daily prescription medication and it’s on automatic refill. However now and then I forget to take my pill and then I have an extra. After years of this I found myself with 20-30 pills left when my next bottle was ready.
So I tried to call the pharmacy and say hey that bottle of pills you have waiting for me? I still need it, but not for about 3 weeks. Can you push my entire schedule back that much but otherwise keep the pace the same?
Turned out I was able to do this just by listening to menus, selecting from multiple choice, and entering numbers for dates.
I was so satisfied! I don’t want to talk to a human if I can possibly help it. I’d much rather deal with an automated system as long as it can do what’s needed. The problem is that most of them can’t. But then again most customer service humans are useless too, so…
My belief is that this is an unhinged take.
It would be so much better to just have a website with all of those outions. Why does it need to be a phone system at all? I hate calling in, I just want to enter an identifier of some sort and click a couple buttons…
Because they are not trying to design an efficient system. They are trying to design a system that is as cheep as possible, puts off as many customers as possible from interacting with it while not being so bad as to fall foul of regulations. A well designed website that efficiently took you to the right place to make your complaint and get money from them/make them do something would fail requirement 2.
Yeah that’s an excellent point. Older generations still prefer phone calls but I imagine increasingly the only people who want to call will be the people who can’t fix their issue via an automated system.
Yup. I’m pretty good at avoiding talking to people, yet I’ve needed to call in a few times recently for stuff I should’ve been able to handle online:
- report fraud
- cancel credit card
- report internet outage
- buy insurance
If they want to save money on customer support, make the customer support less necessary to get routine tasks done…
I had the displeasure of being called by one from a vendor. It pissed me off that they couldn’t be bothered to pick up the phone and call using a human, with how much we paid them. I canceled that contract and went with a different vendor, and let the sales team know exactly why. LLMs have their place, but my time is not the waste bin.
Completely off topic, but I sang your username in my head… It really is weirdly catchy…
Hahahahaha!! I was sitting there, on the Pick Username screen for a good 5 minutes, singing that song in my head, trying to think of a good username. After a while, I thought to myself, “that’s a good enough username, in done thinking about this”, and sang it out loud as I typed it in… 3
Fair point but no one wants to deal with my incessant whining, and you couldn’t pay me enough to deal with it. Sometimes a scratching post is what the cat needs.
could have told you this considering they also hated the days of “press or say your issue now”.
But to be fair, most AIs surveyed thought it was great!
"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!”
Realistically we only dislike it because it’s a half baked solution. I know that if those LLMs actually did anything useful we wouldn’t mind them. But all these LLMs do is spam the documentation, which is already on the vendor website anyway.
The telephone services i had to use in my Lifetime were so insanely bad, thats one of the few things llm could do better than an underpaid person who has no will to live anymore and got yelled at for hours. This shit needs to end.
No. What actually needs to happen is for companies to give GOOD FUCKING CUSTOMER SERVICE!!! Try getting ahold of a real person at Amazon for example. I ended up cold calling the delivery company that handles local deliveries to get a phone number to talk to an actual person.
The next time i called they had turned that number into a robo call center…
I never had issues with Amazon support. To be fair, the last time I needed support was over 4 years ago, but still. I got to chat with some real person relatively quickly who managed to address the issue swiftly.
The only good thing about is that, with most companies, if you need a refund for something under $10, it generally just gives you the refund and sets you off on your merry way.
I’m already pissed with bots, had to call my ISP yesterday because my internet was spotty, I couldn’t talk to a single human, the bot was walking me through the tired modem restart, and then it ended the call and asked for me rate it even though it didn’t solve anything!
I worked for an ISP. These problems are rarely ever ISP problems. It goes like this. ISP offers 50Mbps–1.2Gbps. If you are a cheap bastard and opt for the lowest tier plan you get a cheap hardware and if you don’t ask for an upgrade you’ll run that box until it doesn’t work. So you have people rocking hardware that was manufactured in 2009 and installed in 2014 wondering why their cheap ass WIFI4 box installed in their basement doesn’t work so well in half their house in 2024.
What’s more they have a download speed that would have been good in 2009 only instead of 2 computers they now have 20 connected devices and stream in 4K.
What’s worse is the rental on that shit WIFI4 box is about $20 a month or $2400 over 10 years so your paying for a BMW and getting a Pinto.
Smart people buy their own access points preferably wifi 7. Get one per story of your house and connect them with a physical Ethernet cable. Arrange them so that they overlap but not that much so that you don’t have dead zones. If you work from home get a proper desk and run a physical Ethernet cable to your device. Also if you have devices that are literally 2.5 feet from each other and they support physical network cables just plug them in. Don’t be that guy spending an hour trying to figure out why his router and his printer/tv aren’t friends when they are almost touching each other.
That’s cool and all but it was a regional problem on their end, I learned after trying the whatsapp bot, which worked way better than the phone piece of shit.
I actually had a pretty godawful hardware provided by the ISP years before, that I just killed in salt water and said it wasn’t working, then I got a new one from them that actually had a good wi-fi range :).
You know you didn’t have to commit modemacide. You could have actually just asked for new hardware.
They refused, I did what I had to do :)
The hardware the ISP provides is always an ISP problem. Provide hardware that actually works.
Also, unless you’re fiber, you don’t provide the bandwidth you actually sell people, which is also an ISP problem. Every single customer who can’t get their advertised speed at peak load should be a mandatory criminal case of fraud.
The majority of users can’t get anywhere near advertised speeds because the are using cheap devices to connect to their cheap wifi and WIFI in general isn’t expected to provide plan speeds in the first place. Also bandwidth is oversold. An ISP that serves 1,000,000 people with Gbps doesn’t actually have 1 Pbps bandwidth available to it. Most people should be able to get within 95% WHEN CONNECTED BY A WIRE TO MODEM most of the time and 90% of plan speed near all the time.
Did you know your phone doesn’t work if too many people in the same area try to use them at once because they don’t actually have enough capacity to serve everyone at once?
The hardware the company provides unconditionally needs to be able to handle the full advertised bandwidth.
I know bandwidth is oversold. It’s overt fraud. “Up to” is horseshit. “Most of the time” is fraud. Excluding documented weather outages, any scenario where a user is not able to reach the speed listed on the ad (that’s not a limitation on the other side) for 5 minutes in a month should be fines so high that it will take years of that customer’s subscription to earn it back. It’s not possible for selling service you can’t provide to not be fraudulent.
Over-subscription is literally how the entire internet works. Most devices spend 21 hours doing a whole lot of nothing and 3 hours either doing really quick bursty things like spending 3 seconds loading a page followed by 3 minutes interacting with it or relatively low speed things like streaming 50Mbps. Having a higher speed just means that when you want something to happen it happens quickly and it happens even if you have 12 other devices doing the same thing.
Normal internet is oversubscribed by about 20x and gives most folks 90% of their plan speed at the modem most of the time. Dedicated bandwidth by definition means that you rent enough capacity for them to serve 1Gbps every second of every day even though you will use almost none of it. For reference 1Gbps for a month is about 327 TB of data. Most people use between 0.1-3TB over the course of a month.
Dedicated connections are a lot more expensive to provide and a lot more expensive to contract for. That 1Gbps connection right now costs about $1000 per month. Your requirement would require ISP to sell only much lower connection speeds for at much higher prices. It would in fact actually break the internet as we know it. It’s not exactly shocking to imagine that buying 100–1000 times what you need is expensive. A better standard would be to enforce 90% of plan speed 90% of the time measured at the modem with a week to correct if less than acceptable. Some european company actually makes an app to enforce their particular standard and takes the guess work out of measurement. I like the idea.
Also its impossible to guarantee that customers will in fact even reach those speeds over wifi as its a function of the customers actual space, materials used to build the home, what’s in the wall, network hardware, AND wireless clients. You only get really fast connectivity over 5/6Gh which is short range (100-200ft), only with quite modern equipment on both sides.
This means that your 2015 $200 modem/router combo with 2018 clients is probably giving you 300Mbps in your living room and 50Mbps upstairs even if the modem itself is getting 1 Gbps. This is just how wifi is. Your ISP isn’t going to be responsible for installing a $1000 worth of hardware so you can get plan speed upstairs on your $20 a month service. There are contractors who WILL do that for you for a hefty price. You’ll be paying for the $1000 worth of hardware and a professionals time.
No one is expecting ISPs to have the bandwidth to handle every network at once maxing out their bandwidth.
We’re expecting enough bandwidth to have enough overhead that they literally never once fail to meet peak demand. Because every single minute they fail to do so should be a mandatory felony count of fraud against every single member of the board.
A felony per minute is an insane standard. You already can get service with a SLA its much more expensive. Sevice with a felony per minute for meeting demand would be the same 1000 per month. Your ideas are so stupid they would end internet service in America.
So the ISP isn’t to blame when the cheap ISP-provided hardware fails, and the solution isn’t for the ISP to replace insufficient ISP-owned hardware but for you to buy your own instead?
The “wire everything” approach is a little excessive for most home networks too, outside of exceptional circumstances modern WiFi on modern hardware is more than enough for home users. It’s only worth the time and money to wire everything if you’ve identified specific issues with signal loss or noise, don’t just do it by default.
I don’t know why the ISP would initiate an upgrade you never asked for especially when they provide both faster speeds and better hardware as an up sell. If you want to live in 2009 it is indeed your problem. I made a fair bit of commission upgrading people to much much better hardware and speed for not much more money. Hi would you like your internet to be 20x faster and be able to use it upstairs for 15% more. Yes of course you do.
You should wire
- Your home office if you work from home.
This is where your money comes from it should work as fast and as consistently as possible. Being 10% less reliable isn’t acceptable.
- Things that are literally right next to one another.
If your console, cable box, and TV are all on the same shelf as the modem/router why are they competing for bandwidth with your laptop?
- The connection between routers/access points if your space warrants more than one.
The speed the second or subsequent devices are able to provide to all of its clients put together is limited by the speed of its connection to the first device and if its too far for a 5Ghz connection this wont be that fast. EG your upstairs router might support in theory a 600Mbps connection but if its connection is 80Mbps and 4 devices are connected an individual client may get as little as 20Mbps even if its connection to the router/AP is 600Mbps
I made a fair bit of commission upgrading people to much much better hardware and speed for not much more money.
See that’s your entire problem right there, you’re in sales. Your incentive is to drain every penny you can out of customers through useless up-sells and selling hardware to get the service they’re already paying for.
You literally just argued that if your 600mbps router only supplies an 80mbps connection then your 600mbps connection is 80mbps. And speed isn’t divided equally by the number of devices connected either, that’s just ridiculous. The impact of a connected but idle device is minimal. Also, why would you need 600mbps for only 4 devices? You could stream 4k video on all four devices 24/7 and you’re still not using even a quarter of that bandwidth; you’re looking at a recommendation of only 15mbps to 25mbps per user for a 4k-viable internet connection.
Here’s a ping to my stock ISP-supplied router on another floor and three rooms away via wifi:
--- 192.168.1.1 ping statistics --- 611 packets transmitted, 611 received, 0% packet loss, time 623436ms rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 0.647/0.779/2.105/0.110 msIt’s obviously impossible to improve a 0% packet loss, switching to a wired connection would be a considerable cost for minimal benefit (though admittedly that ping is unusually good, I’d normally expect slightly over 1ms average). I’m also getting over my advertised speeds according to fast.com and speedtest.net despite being on wifi and running through Mullvad so I suppose the problem might just be that I’m not using whichever scummy ISP you work for.
I have a home office and have work from home (or hybrid) for pretty much my entire career, even before WFH was normalised. I can assure you a wired connection is not a necessity to work from home.
Ya this happens so much. So frustrating. On the voice ones I get so fed up I just keep saying “agent” until I’m finally redirected.
I extremely hate this idea. I I already hate the automated systems that are definitely designed to make you give up just trying to talk to an actual human being. Hopefully, we can get more lawsuits around the world like the Air canada one where they are liable for any bs the ai decides to make up, along with actual laws saying the same. Hopefully, it would discourage them.
I love the idea of useful and improved AI-automations, based on the fact every site currently has a “customer service robot” that have never once helped with a resolution at all.
IMO it can eliminate a huge amount of support queries and leave the important stuff to the actual agent if done right. …with the caveat of yeah fuck AI if it’s fully instead of agents.
There’s this boomer obsession with making it listen to human speech…
Nobody under 40 wants to use human speech to talk to an AI. We don’t want to us human speech to talk to humans most of the time, especially if we don’t know them.
But they always want to jam an AI into areas where human speech is the main communication method.
The absolute last place AI should have been deployed is answering a phone call. Because that is the last resort for most people, but the boomers calling the shots still think that’s people’s go to move before trying anything else
While some of this is cultural, it’s also about accessibility. Old people want to use their voice because their sight is often less reliable and they aren’t as good at pushing the right buttons. My father for example is functionally blind and voice is all he has. So before we get mad at boomers calling all the shots, let’s consider that they’re not just old fashioned. They’re old. and so will you be one day.
Ooh, there’s a fun question:
Would you rather:
An AI handle customer service, or
An overseas call center handle customer service
?
Depends. Can I easily make the AI hallucinate and give me free shit/tell me something I can later use to get free shit?
iirc someone attempted that already with plane tickets
As it should be. The consumer doesn’t care why the support agent offered something, if it’s offered and advertised, the customer should get it. They can fix their support if it’s costing them too much.
