[sklarsa]

I love the ending of this story, which isn't obvious from just looking at the title. The author identified key pain points around customer support, automated them, and went back to enjoying life. This is the kind of thing that gets me excited about the possibilities of technology and AI as a force multiplier, especially when working on side projects, "lifestyle" businesses, or even startups as a single founder.

[_se]

No one wants to talk to an AI for customer support.

[parpfish]

i've gone back and forth on this over the last few months.

I started out thinking that we've all been conditioned by bad customer support chatbots whose only purpose is to look up facts from the FAQ and then tell you to call the real customer support line to actually handle your problem. the problem was that the chatbots weren't granted hee ability and authority to actually do things. wouldn't it be great if you could aks a bot to cancel your account or change your billing info and it would actually do it?

but then i realized... anything with a clearly defined process or workflow like that would be even better if it were just a form on an account settings page. why bother with a chatbot?

customer support lines run by humans exist for two reasons: - increase friction for things you don't want your user to do (like cancel their account without first hearing a bunch of sales pitches) - handle unanticipated problems that don't fit into the happy-path you've set up on the settings page

My worry is that business dudes will get excited about making chatbots that can do the former and they'll never trust an AI to be able to handle the later. So I'm now of the opinion that having AI customer support will only be used to make things worse.

[crazygringo]

Actually, I do.

There's no wait in line. There's no waiting 2 min for each response in chat, or waiting 5 min on hold while the rep figures out what to do. And I've, shockingly, gotten issues resolved faster and better.

Using one semi-popular consumer app -- once it pointed me to docs on their site that Google wasn't finding because I didn't know what keywords to use. And twice it escalated me to send a message to the relevant team, where I got a response that addressed my problem -- and where escalation would have been necessary with a human call-center rep anyways.

The point is that it was far, far faster than any chat rep OR phone rep. And it's far faster to escalate too.

I'm sure this experience isn't universal, but I've been truly shocked at how it's turned what are otherwise 15-20 minute interactions into 3 minute interactions. At the same level of quality or better.

[Cthulhu_]

Doesn't need to be AI, most customer support was already automated before ChatGPT rose to prominence. Hell, I developed a mobile website once for a power company that was basically a wizard / checklist of "Have you checked for known outages? Have you checked your breakers? Have you checked if your neighbours have issues too?" before they were shown the customer service number.

Human contact doesn't scale, or is prohibitively expensive. I sat with customer support a while ago (again energy sector, but different company) to observe, and every phone call was at least ten minutes, often 20-30, plus some aftercare in the form of logging the call or sending out a follow-up email.

They also did chat at the time, where a chatbot (which wasn't ChatGPT / AI based yet but they're working on it) would do the initial contact, give low-hanging fruit suggestions based on their input, and ask for their information like their address before connecting to a real human. The operator was only allowed to handle two chats at a time, and each chat session took about half an hour - with some ending because the person on the other side idled too long. I mean granted, the UI wasn't great and the customer service guy wasn't a fast typer, but even then it was time-consuming and did not scale. They had two dozen people clocked in, if they were all as fast as this one person, they can handle 50 support calls an hour at most.

It does not scale. This was for a company with about 2.5 million users who rarely need customer support. Compare with companies like Google or Facebook that have billion(s) of users. They automated and obfuscated their customer support ages ago.

[pc86]

People want their support solved as quickly as possible. They don't want to talk to AI support bots because it's just an inefficient, error-prone wrapper over the documentation, which if you have an actual support need (as opposed to "I just haven't read any of the documentation") that kind of AI support isn't going to be helpful.

If you have an AI customer support that can actually support customer service requests and provide resolution, people will use it and be happy about it, or at least indifferent.

[unethical_ban]

Broadly, I agree. And I am furious with Progressive insurance for requiring a smart phone/mobile app to file roadside assistance claims, and my inability to get someone real on a call.

But,

In this particular story, the people were asking questions that were answered in the instructions.

No one wants to waste their time answering stupid questions, particularly if they are a solo small shop who gets entitled people asking questions around the clock.

[chamomeal]

If it’s well-implemented, it’s fantastic.

This isn’t really customer support, but prisma (popular typescript ORM) has an AI that can answer just about any prisma-related question. It’s got a great RAG setup, can help think through novel scenarios, and always refers to specific docs pages and GitHub issues.

I think it’s made by a company called kapa. Those guys are gonna go far. That thing works SO well. I’ve been imagining how good life would be with a prisma-style AI docs assistant for things like massive, obtuse google APIs.

[maerF0x0]

I want to talk to an AI for customer support as the first line so long as there is always a "Talk to a human" escape hatch.

And for less than about $50 a month, I understand why they need to spend less than half an hour per month to retain me. It'd be net negative profit otherwise. (unless they offshore, in which case the math is only slightly better).

[throwaway2037]

And, yet, millions already do. The point of AI for customer support is to handle the very simple requests (maybe half). The rest, you can escalate. If AI doesn't know what to do, "Hmm, I'm not sure. Let me escalate your question/request to my manager." For most normies, this will work well.

[Vegenoid]

No one wants to perform customer support either. Generally, people who are smart and capable of offering good support will stop doing it because there are more fruitful and enjoyable things for them to do.

[bluedino]

I usually agree, but Lemonade (insurance) has an amazing support bot.

[btbuildem]

Eh... I think there's a balance to be struck. You could leverage AI to handle the initial messages (90% of which are tire kickers or scammers) and funnel worthy exchanges to continue the conversation manually.

[berkes]

Maybe not.

But there are many ways in which AI can improve or help support. So even if "AI chat support" turns out to not work, AI can still be very helpful in automating support.

Like detecting duplicates, preparing standard answers, grouping similar requests, assigning messages to priorities and/or people and so on.

[conradfr]

No one needs to know it's one ;)

[datavirtue]

Much better than an unengaged, unempowered exploited human.

[hermitcrab]

Sure, write an FAQ and usability test your software. But I'm not convinced that you can automated/AI away your support burden in any meaningful way that isn't going to piss off your customers.

[authorfly]

Yes it's great writing. But it's not really about automating I feel (please chime in author OP?). To me he wanted to get away from customer email ghosting and disputes. He chose to change the customer support approach and create customer service tools to manage the common requests programmatically. I feel from the writing that his original vision, or continuing to extend the product and scale it, has now changed to maintaining it as is. He realizes customer requests and the time/disappointment of all that grows linear to revenue and does not want to do that any more.