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Comment by savanaly | Hacker News Reader

>And it keeps being pushed on customers because it's beneficial for corporations: customers will fruitlessly navigate chat support rather than realizing they should give up and call

Businesses tend to thrive when consumers choose to keep using them, not when they don't. How does users fruitlessly navigating chat support serve that end?

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That's a _long-term_ problem, though. This would be far from the first time that companies prioritise short-term savings over long-term revenue due to perverse incentives.

No-one's getting promoted for "declined to ruin our customer support, thus avoiding loss of X recurring revenue per year over the next decade", but they might get promoted for "reduced cost of customer support by X with AI!!!"

In the long run the invisible hand will dole out rewards and punishments here, but thinking about the short term is just _easier_ than thinking about the long term.

> In the long run the invisible hand will dole out rewards and punishments

Only in competitive markets.

That’s true in theory, I’m not sure about in practice. It could also be the case that a company says “human support is too expensive, throw in a chat bot to stem the tide”, see the number of calls drop, and call it a success. Never mind how many potential customers are lost (which actually requires competence to measure.)

It reduces costs in the short term by firing all your customer support staff.

There is no long term in modern capitalism.

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