You've nailed it. I've been a customer support specialist in tech startups for the last many years, and the HUGE and overwhelming majority of questions are about things that have been covered in detail in the support documentation by any even half-competent team. People do not normally search for their own answers. More than 90% of tickets are well-answered (according to the user's satisfaction score!) by a pre-written response explaining how an article in the support center addresses their specific question, and then linking to it.

This is why large companies end up hiring thousands of low-wage workers who are prohibited by their software from sending anything but a pre-written response. The first-level agents can't even edit it. They can only send you something someone else wrote for the common situation.

Chat bots could easily replace these workers, and the customer experience would be better for it.

You will (probably) always still need the higher level agents who are really tech support, the ones who can identify when someone's report really is a bug and get it reported to engineers for fixing.

Those aren't the low-level agents in these outsourced call centers, though. Even if those people do recognize an issue, they can't do anything until they've sent you some number of generic responses that haven't satisfied you.

At least the bot could be trained to customize responses within a set of parameters and match the tone of the asker.

But they're not replacing those agents with chatbots. They're replacing all agents with chatbots.

Yeah, that statement is so out there and incorrect that it invalidates the whole article even though I agree with the premise.

Yeah, the author is assuming that the general populace is like themselves (and like most HN commenters, I suspect): fairly high degree of technical competence, able to find workarounds for most issues in an app or website or forum somewhere.

But most people aren't like that.

When I use these chatbots or contact customer support, it's probably because I need a very basic and simple thing done.

Not because I don't want to do it myself. Because the website I'm using is throwing error messages, the form to do it myself has disappeared five years ago, and the only way to accomplish what I want is to bother someone over the phone.

When I worked customer service, I'm sure customers could've done most of the things they wanted to do themselves, if the website wasn't unclear, the help articles weren't incomplete and outdated, the manuals were up to date and the necessary buttons were accessible to the end user.

Companies sabotage themselves with shitty business practices so their cheap support lines get overwhelmed. Almost everything I've wanted to get done through a chatbot should've been an HTML form in my account panel, but businesses don't want to make it easy to return things or ask for refunds. They want you to jump through as many hoops and redirections as possible, because that makes them money.

With the way ChatGPT just lies and deceives out of the box, I've started taking screenshots of chatbot conversations. These businesses are making these chatbots their official point of contact so I take everything these bots promise to do or claim to have done as an official statement from their support department.

> I agree dealing with a bot in that situation sucks, but a big chunk of customer questions can probably be answered without human intervation by LLMs, assuming they have enough data about the organization and its products.

Hoenstly? I don't care about the company's problems giving support. If I have a problem, and the company won't resolve it, or if they waste too much of my time forcing me to go through a bot first, then I'm not their customer anymore. There are plenty of other places who actually appreciate my business.