[DavidWoof]

Give me an AI chatbot over someone with poor English skills reading a script any day of the week. My problem probably isn't unique, it's probably something fairly obvious that was vague in the instructions.

Now, the important thing is offer a way to upgrade to a human. But I have no problem at all starting with AI, in fact I honestly prefer it.

[rcxdude]

That doesn't really match my experience. Usually if my problem is not unique it's already documented somewhere and I've solved it that way (And support generally puts some effort into documenting the non-unique problems to reduce their workload). If I'm calling support, it's because I've exhausted all other options and I've either concluded I need them to do something I can't do with an online form or the information is not at all accessible elsewhere, in which case first line support is nothing but an obstacle.

[nijave]

It's hit or miss. Sometimes screaming "give me a compotent human" at a chatbot is quicker than pleading with tier 1. Sometimes it's not

At least there's no hold time

[threetonesun]

Sure, because you've already lived with 10+ years of enshittification in the process. Customer support used to be an in-house team that was actually trained on providing relevant support, not an outsourced call-center that's as (or more) useless than a chatbot.

In some ways it's not that different with hiring. I used to work with HR teams that knew the roles they were hiring for extremely well and could make reliable calls on whether or not to pass a candidate to a hiring manager. More recently I've seen HR get outsourced entirely, or staffed with cheaper employees that just shuffle documents through systems.

[gowld]

The AI and the human are both programmed to avoid helping you.

[MattGaiser]

At this point I find the humans know so little that an LLM referencing documentation or past support answers is superior.