its surprising to HN tech crowd but a well implemented support agent gets higher reviews and successful resolutions than humans
maybe will be public soon with earnings calls? We’ll see!
But what you shouldn’t do is try to dress up adversarial policies behind a friendly customer service bot and then fire your entire support staff. That is immediately obvious and will drive people bonkers.
If a firm is so deceptive that they cant even do that, then they probably are deceptive in other ways too.
So its kind of a useful signal, ironically, for who not to do business with.
This is the key, IMHO. I have not been able to access my Coinbase account for some time due to a login issue. (No error is displayed, but a successful login returns me to the login screen). The AI driven phone agent was actually very good at working through the problem, but there was no escalation to a human after that. When the agent couldn't solve my problem, it told me to mail a physical letter describing my issue to an address on 5th Ave in NYC.
When the agent couldn't solve my problem, it
told me to mail a physical letter describing
my issue to an address on 5th Ave in NYC.
So instead of companies working on their AI support execution, I wish they would just work on their website.
Can someone give me examples of the kind of support they want from a company that could be provided by AI, but could not be better provided by a well designed app and/or site?
Staffing our phone lines is the absolute bane of my small (non tech) business.
I find that 99%+ of support LLMs are just an extra hurdle that cant provide me with what I want.
I used Kogans chat LLM the other day, I gave it the details of my enquiry and it escalated me to a human. The human reviewed the case and then raised a ticket for a technical contact. I am not particularly angry at the LLM or the first human, but one of them is definitely redundant and wasting my time.
Containment from the bot alone shot up past 50%. Customer satisfaction with support went through the roof. And this was basic knowledge support with account awareness. We had not wired up any tools yet.
Every automated service I ever interacted with was built in a way that it would not help you with anything that incurs a cost to the company that built it.
I think frontier models are really good at solving technical problems. So if your support call is "how do I do this with the product" and there is a way to do that then I agree it can be a great experience. At the point where you need to involve the engineering team and maybe get bugs fixed I imagine the AI will push back because the entire reason the AI is there is to solve cost and if it ends up creating bugs or bugging the engineering team it'll start consuming money instead of saving it. It probably could be engineered to do this but the incentives are pretty strong not do that.
Apart from the Facebook AI customer support which would just blindly send MFA reset emails to wherever you asked.
My main takeaway from that interview was that tier1 CS is a low-wage, high-turnover industry, so the amount of training agents can realistically get is limited. AI support is cheaper, smarter, and can take in more context faster. With AI, it makes sense to have a "support engineer" who identifies the edge cases and writes Markdown documents instructing agents on what to do in those cases. This actually lets you make agents much, much more helpful than human employees ever could be.
[1] (There's a high-quality transcript available) https://www.complexsystemspodcast.com/episodes/des-traynor/