Re:No One Wants to Talk to Your Chatbot
by reaperducer on Thursday July 27, 2023 @06:05PM
(#36900776)
Now they're saving a buck dumping human operators and letting the powerless chatbots tell the users "sorry but I can't change your situation, have a nice day"
I saw a television ad a few days ago where the entire point of the ad was for the company to show off that it has real, live customer service people answering the phones in Arizona.
"I'm Brittany, and I'm a real human being, here to help you!"
It was the one tiny glimmer of hope that the market may sort this out. But it won't.
Re:No One Wants to Talk to Your Chatbot
by polynomial on Thursday July 27, 2023 @11:55PM
(#36902978)
>It was the one tiny glimmer of hope that the market may sort this out. But it won't.
Sure it will. Get ready for the coming wave of bots that simply lie and claim to be a "real human being."
If I worked on that I would call it "project Pinocchio"
The Verizon website has the worst chatbot I've ever interacted with. It's the worst because it's mandatory and useless. It's just about the only way to start a tech support interaction, and it is completely incapable of actually solving any problems beyond telling you to power cycle. (Granted, probably half of all of Verizon's tech support problems can be solved by power cycling) But then it's also self-unaware and misleading. It will straight up tell you "yes, I can do that", and then twelve statements and twenty five minutes later tell you "sorry, I can't do that, you need to call this phone support number". What a shit pile. I hate chatbots and I also hate Verizon.
This is what's driving me crazy. The stupid "I want to sell you our crap" chatbots are easy to block (uBlock rules exist for most of them, as they are often existing products integrated into websites) but the chatbots people are forced to engage with are the ones that exist to replace callcenter workers.
First companies reduced the influence and power of callcenter workers to make them useless for customers. Now they're saving a buck dumping human operators and letting the powerless chatbots tell the users "sorry but I can't change your situation, have a nice day".
With advances in voice synthesis, I expect chatbots to replace phone operators any day now, probably with a prompt like "you are a company X helpdesk operator. Try to upsell to any customer as much as you can, and try to make them feel pleased even if you can't help them solve their problems".