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I've had the bot of a "modern" holiday home tell me some rubbish about luggage storage. Fortunately, I knew that there would be a human fallback during working hours so it worked out OK. But who thought that it was a good idea to have a shitty bot to ask about important things?

It's being sold everywhere to people fed up with dealing with other people who waste their time. Because that really IS a problem.

Most (Note: Not all!) questions you get when you work in a "customer service" role come from lazy, unobservant, or dumb people. So pre-AI, a large business needs an army of people to answer the phone and do things like walking confused people through, step-by-step, how to reset their password. "Did you check your email? Did you check the Spam folder? Did you give it 5-10 minutes?"

So AI is sold with the promise that you can just put it in front of your human agents, and then you'll only need 1/5 the staff (let's set aside the unfortunate economic implications for the other 80%) because most people's questions are stupid and trivial to solve.

Problem is, the dummies can't identify and divert themselves to the bot up front, so the person who loses most (other than the CS agents who lost their jobs) is people like you or me, who only contact customer service when we are reasonably sure there is no way to solve our own problem on the website/the app/by ourselves.

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Once is a fairly long while, I do have a duh moment. But usually I hesitate and hesitate because i'm sure I'll get some low-level CS person working from a script. The upside such as it is is that I'm (rarely) pleasantly surprised.

Somehow it feels like it's real (for some people) in experience. I've dealt with both Spectrum/TWC and Verizon FiOS support within the last couple of years and been pleasantly surprised that I could talk 'tech' with the first person I encountered and we cut right through all the troubleshooting bullshit to get things fixed.

Spectrum - we had a voice and a data cable modem (due to location and cabling requirements). Lost the phone service. Called in and the first things I offered them were the MAC addresses off both modems and which one was supposed to be which. That set off the "shit, he knows what he's doing" moment and we got both modems running correctly in less than ten minutes, including IVR and hold time.

Verizon - had a weird ticket that ended up being a NOC issue. Explained the odd backstory of events, a ticket that happened a couple days prior that I was part of a regional outage, and the Tier 1 guy had me hop on a video call to point my camera at my computer at the ONT where I basically did everything without him asking me to (cabling direct, pulling up IP status info, etc, live reboots) and he ran it by a NOC guy remotely and it ended up being a bigger ticket above me. Took an extra day of a regional outage, but that data helped them get rolling.

It's nice to read the happy path cases like yours. The bad experiences tend to stick in our memories much more, but if I'm being honest, I have also sometimes had calls with bright, helpful people who weren't limited to script-reading and reboot prompting. Shoutout to the Tier 1 guys and girls out there who have taken it upon themselves to be truly helpful.

FWIW, my question would have been in any decent FAQ but there wasn't one. It was simply: I have to return my keycard when leaving the room in the morning, but I need to store some luggage until the evening. How do I get into the building and into the storage room? IIRC, the main door was just open at daytime, but the luggage room needed a keycard (really smart system, you clowns). Fortunately, there was a guard / service person when I came to pick up my stuff and I more or less knew that in advance based on previous days.

I had a bot tell me to click something in the chat when it had sent me an email... The whole experience was so bad that the company behind it lost my business.

I called my dentist because I was sick and wanted to move my appointment. You can't talk to a human anymore, it's all ai, after a bit of back and forth it assured me it had canceled my appointment and booked a new one 2 days later. I was actually surprised it went so well

The next day I get an email at 7pm telling my appointment was successfully rescheduled for 1pm (the same day), none of these match either my og appointment nor the rescheduled one

When I went to the dentist for the appointment the ai assistant supposedly rebooked, they told me there was a mistake and I was assigned a kids dentist.

In the end I had to rebook a third appointment with the receptionist

Dentists are plentiful and none of them really know what they are doing (see recent experiment posted here on HN that has The data to support this asserrion).

I switch at the slightest sign of friction.

I had this a while ago; had to actually physically go to the dentist to move my appointment (with the receptionist, who used to answer the phone). Absolutely ridiculous. Particularly as, if they actually want to automate this, well, _calendar software has existed for decades_. No need to use AI bullshit.

seems to me like having a chatbot is the 2020s version of the 2000s "having a website" or 2010s "having a facebook page"

except it's worse, if you manage to get some info out of it, it could all be just hallucinated, you were told a lie and no one is responsible.

it's like the only purpose is to erect a barrier between the company and its clients.

They’re building very little. They’ve been sold/told AI is good at customer service. They usually only bother pointing it to their knowledge base and FAQs and can only really answer questions if the answer is in that