[Dyac]

How much of it really requires AI though? I bet the majority, if not all of the support that the AI offers could have been done with some of the non-AI chat flow builders if a handful of smart people got together and actually worked the flows out properly to handle the scenarios.

[ben_w]

Quite a lot of call centres, are, from a user perspective, a flow chart with a human serving as a voice-to-computer interface.

However, I've encountered some pretty weird interactions with customer support over the years, including reportedly "The iMac can't do anything except browse the internet" when the demo unit on display behind them was running Nanosaur (a game); "we only support Microsoft Internet Explorer" when the customer support team didn't have that installed on their computers; «You need a Windows PC and an Android phone» from the German PostIdent people despite it being obvious they could talk to us while we used a Mac and that they knew this because they raised the issue spontaneously; and "yes, we will get your internet connection running by the end of tomorrow" from BT (it took them a month or two, by which time I had already cancelled; apparently someone put the wires in back to front).

[sonicanatidae]

My fav was a Dell Tier 1 insisting that he could not process an RMA without me gathering info from the BIOS screen on a laptop THAT WOULD NOT POWER ON.

It only took me explaining it 3 times, then telling him to "get a fucking person on the phone that understands tech", which he did and it was processed in minutes.

There's poor training, then there's just plain stupid.

Clarification: I'd given him the Service Tag, so he knew what device it was. He was insisting that I run the diagnostics and report the results, which is even dumber, in the end.

[sokoloff]

> a flow chart with a human serving as a voice-to-computer interface

Also known as IPoV (IP over voice).

[sn0wf1re]

Isn't that the point though? There is no need to make chat flow builders and pay the "handful of smart people" to figure them out.

If AI costs were reaching very high levels perhaps they would try to make non-AI flows for standard processes. But I think that is unlikely given how cheap AI is vs smart people wages.

[Dyac]

I think the problem is that building out chat flows, sitting down with customer care and figuring this stuff out, iterating and improving the "if this then that" logic within a flow builder tool isn't particularly sexy work. "LLMs" and "AI" is though.

The cost of using generative AI to answer questions is orders of magnitude more expensive than using flows. Plucking a company out of thin air - Landbot [1] offers both flow and generative chats. For $100 per month you can have 2,500 flow chats, or 30 "AI" chats. That's nearly a 100x difference in cost. The risks are much higher too - with the flow builders if there's a sudden policy change or whatever then someone can just go into the system and edit it - with AI you'd have to retrain the model somehow. There's also no risk of hallucination with a flow based builder.

I'm not saying that Gen AI customer service chatbots don't have a use - what I'm trying to say is that in the real world, business would probably be better served day-to-day with just setting up decent flows in rules based bots. That's unsexy though - it doesn't attract tech talent, it doesn't get people promoted and it doesn't get shouted about in the press. It is, however, probably much better for the environment and the company's P&L (but possibly not their valuation if they're trying to ride the hype train).

[1] https://landbot.io/pricing

[kreetx]

That's my impression as well: if customer service had been a priority enough, then these smart people would have been gathered already. But there have always been more important things to do. And now with LLMs, you don't have to find these smart people, and those you already have can do something else important.