alt Hacker NewsI'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. We have to argue with a bot which is prompted "You're about to hear from a dummy whose main problem is most likely that he hasn't read any of our ZenDesk support articles, can't operate our website or a computer properly... and he probably has an IQ of 75. Send him answers from the FAQ -- repeatedly if needed -- and try to get him to go away. Don't give up, and don't escalate to an agent unless very specific criteria are met."