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Comment by nottorp | Hacker News Reader

Contact forms are dead. These days you type some text in a box and a LLM gives you a few answers that are totally unrelated to your problem.

If you want to contact support, you have to threaten to cancel. If they even care about that.

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> If they even care about that.

Yea, something I've noticed lately is that companies are beginning to be OK with letting go of customers they can't just silently and passively milk forever. It used to be, you could call up your cable company and threaten to cancel, and they'd pass you over to a "customer retention" specialist who will give you a deal that lowers your cost to what it was a few years ago. Last time I tried that trick, they put me on a brief hold and then came back to the phone with "OK, sir, your service is canceled as of today. Is there anything else I can do for you?" Whoops!

I complained to Amazon a few months ago as one of my subscription orders was a few days late noting in the complaint that the service “didn’t feel very prime”. The CSR responded by cancelling my prime subscription despite my not even nearly suggesting I wanted this! (So, naturally, I opened a new complaint about this and received an apology and a few months credit added to my reinstated prime subscription).

Sounds like ‘AI’ interpreting your email as a cancellation? Although I have now had LLMs parsing my intent for a support question better than the human employee that was appointed to me.

They realy are to rich if shit lile this flys, but I guess they realy just made way to much money in the high economical times.

I, for one, apprechiate a company that will cancel their service easily and doesn't have a secret price list only available to people that complain.

I've heard of the same thing happening with people trying to negotiate a better phone contract. I don't think there's an alternative though. The credible threat of losing you as a customer is, of course, the whole point.

Reminds me of an old quote: If you can’t walk away from a negotiation, you aren’t negotiating.

The real alternative is that you negotiate with their competitor and go back to cancel after you get better terms there.

Threatening to leave was never a good tactic.

> Last time I tried that trick, they put me on a brief hold and then came back to the phone with "OK, sir, your service is canceled as of today.

I canceled Spectrum to jump to a fiber provider. I turned in my equip to a shop and said I was moving out of the country to avoid the retention ordeal.

3 weeks later the plastic cards started coming, every day. Two days ago a Spectrum rep showed up at my house and asked why I quit their service. I explained I needed 1Gb/s upload which ended that part of the conversation.

He next offered me free mobile service which I declined. I closed the door before he could pull out a mix tape.

Nah, the 2024 solution for getting support is through social media. Tag the company account with your complaints, maybe with a few extra tags for large media outlets or popular internet creators that can amplify it.

For example, almost every instance of a YouTube creator retrieving their hacked account in the last few years has been from tagging Team YouTube on Twitter or what not.

Seems the possibility of a social media PR nightmare is the only thing that moves the needle nowadays.

...and that's terrible.

Don't want to sell your soul to Xitter and the Zuckerverse? No customer service for you.

And it gives companies an easy metric to prioritise tickets: Follower count.

Yeah, that's a huge issue for sure. If you don't use any of these services, then getting support is incredibly difficult.

The only possible alternative might arguably be Hacker News if the company is a tech one, since there are Alphabet/Meta/Apple/Amazon employees that use this site, and having someone on the inside champion your cause seems to also help things get resolved more quickly.

2024 solution? I don't know about that. Companies typically use software to manage these complaints across multiple social media platforms. Ever since Twitter began charging an obscene amount of money for their API, companies just shrugged and said goodbye.

That's a fair point, Twitter's certainly not what it used to be. That said, there are still a surprisingly number of large companies using it, and a fair few them still run ads there. Not sure when they'll move to Mastodon/Threads/BlueSky/whatever, but it hasn't seemingly happened quite yet.

Either way, I'd say the best advice in any case would be "be very difficult to ignore, to the point the company's reputation takes a hit if they don't resolve the issue".

So far I've somehow only run across one LLM support chatbot. And it was actually mostly helpful. Not 100% but decent enough. Better than the old support chatbots that just go "does this FAQ entry solve your problem?" Which it never ever does.

In my experience LLM chatbots are a net improvement because they understand "put me in relation with a human" as opposed to the scripted ones that only spit out the FAQ.

What? Where are those? I thought support forms, LLM based or not, are designed to never put you in touch with a human.

I guess that an LLM is harder to scope and retain, and does what it is instructed to. While traditional chatbots can only do what they are programmed for (e.g. follow a scenario), LLMs are easier to sidetrack. Thus you as a client may have an easier time escaping their context, especially when it's a generic LLM integration done by underpaid contractors.

It really depends, but at least here in france many companies start having support over whatsapp/messenger/the likes. They used to suck hard a few years ago, but my recent experience with sncf connect (french railway company) was surprisingly good given my issue was working around an idiosyncracy of their system.

YMMV as we are talking about chatbots and not plain old forms, thus the interactivity is better and feedback loop to escape the LLM's context is faster.

But you can't escape the LLM context if there's nowhere to escape to :)

I.e. when the LLM is your only support option.

> you have to threaten to cancel

They might uno reverse you and charge you €20 for canceling/deleting your account [0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40246171

My new hobby is trying to jailbreak these AI customer support chatbots

Any examples?

Where I live, CS is all chat bots that are simply text representations of the phone tree. You can Whatsapp the company! And get the nicely formatted menus.

Or send a letter to the legal department. Lawyer generally take complaints seriously.

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