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Comment by dmos62 | Hacker News Reader

Good customer support lines? Is there a reason why it can't provide good support. I often use chatgpt's voice function.

How? Businesses will use this to justify removing what few actual human support staff they have left. Nobody, and I mean it, nobody calls customer support because they want to talk to a computer. It’s the last resort for problems that usually can’t be accomplished via the already existing technical flows available via computer.

Beyond true.

I wonder what Amazon's goals are, as an example. Currently, at least on the .ca website, there is no way to even get to chat to fix problems. All their spider text of help options, now always lead back to the return page.

So it's call them (which you can only find the number via Google.)

I suspect they're so disfunctional, that they don't understand why the massive uptick in calls, so then they slap AI in via phone too.

And so now that's slow and AI drivel. I guess soon I'll just have to do chargebacks!? Eg, if a package is missing or whatever.

Interesting, I regularly use chat-based support on amazon.ca to speak with (what I presume is) a real human after none of the control flow paths adequately resolve my issue. I've always found the support quick to reply and very helpful.

Granted, it's been 1-2 weeks since I had an issue, so it may have changed since then, or it could be only released to a subset of users.

I wonder if I'm stuck on the (A)wseome/(B)ad side of A/B testing.

Amazon is generally good at 1) resolving an issue in your favor and 2) getting you to a human if needed but gosh does it feel like I've taken a different path to do so every single time I'ever needed support.

That's not true. I recently called to make an appointment. I don't care if it's an AI. I would actually prefer it, because I wouldn't feel bad about taking a long time to pick the best time. Don't you think you're being a bit dogmatic about this?

I have to feel that an online booking system is substantially lower tech than an ai voice assitant chatbot, and makes it even easier to ruminate as you pick the time that works for you.

In my case, the business did have human support assistants, but didn't do reservations via the phone. I had to switch to the web app for that, which was annoying (I was driving?). I guess doing user identification over the phone and scheduling the appointment are time-consuming for the human assistant, while these are some of the few things an app can do well. I presume the logic is to preserve human assistants for actually complicated or dynamic assistance, for the sake of cost-efficiency. A voice llm can bring down the cost of these basic-but-time-consuming interactions.

The expectation of customer support lines is that customers want to speak to humans. It isn't just the fact that these are semantics that aren't written anywhere and are open to change, because by using a human-like voice agent on a customer support line, you are pretending that that is a human, which is a scam or fraud.

If you really believe that the support can be good, then use a robotic text to speech, don't pretend it's a human. And make it clear to users that they are talking to a human, phone is a protocol that has the semantic that you speak to a human. Use something else.

The bottom line is that you have clients that registered under the belief that they could call a phone number and speak to a human, businesses are performing a short-term switcheroo at the expense of their clients, it's a scam.

> The expectation of customer support lines is that customers want to speak to humans.

Not really. The expectation is to be able to express their need in a natural language, maybe because their issue is not covered by a fixed-form web form (pun not intended).

So yeah AI might be a good fit in that scenario.

It's a protocol and network that has backwards compatibility with 19th century telegram wire networks that later were voice lines for a full century.

If that isn't the channel to speak to a human, nothing is. You can speak to a bot with an app or whatever.

At least make it sound robotty instead of pretending to be a human.

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