Comment by xg15 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by xg15 | Hacker News Reader

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Before LLMs I actually tried those chats a few times. If the bot had actually tried to solve my issue (or at least collect some basic data, then open a support ticket) I wouldn't have minded it.

However what actually happened was that it started the chat with some (pre-scripted) smalltalk, giving the impression I could just write my inquiry in freeform - then completely ignored my text and just asked me a series of scripted questions and directed me to a help page (which I already knew) in the end.

I think LLMs could really be an improvement here, because there is at least the possibility they could give you some answers that are actually tailored to your problem.

Of course it might just as well be that we'll now get a very charming and deeply empathetic response that exactly sums up the gist of your problem and then ... redirects you to the generic help page.

When I worked in an internal team at a bank, we chose to make a bot to replace the FAQ when the number of daily tickets where the response that could be summed up as 'rtfm' hit 30.

It might have been frustrating for the users, but at least we avoided basic questions and our tickets at least we're filled correctly.

I hacked a bypass for the secops who worked a lot with us and at least knew how to fill tickets.

Yeah, the problem is your management then removed any option to talk to a human and left the chatbot do all support.

Yes, and since everybody did that, everyone managed to sour their entire user base on the idea of chatbots.

I've done tech support and I can sympathize, but good god I still hate you for not telling me how to use the bypass.

To be honest it was a hack i did in a day instead of doing my real job because it was less boring, a week after the chat bot was online, I was not really on the support side (i automate stuff). I probably gave the bypass to 6 persons, documented it but i'm pretty sure no one on my team really knew it was there because i left a month later (and also, only one person from the original team was still there.

The real issue (it's also a response to the comment with management and no human interaction) was that our onboarding was shit. Not only our tools for our clients, but also our internal onboarding (i did work on that too in even if it wasn't my job, because i lost weeks in useless processes, to avoid new hires the same pain).

Make a tutorial for your tools. Two even. A long-winded one, and one with only the commandlines , executables and scripts.

I believe one would be the tutorial, the other would be called a how-to.

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