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Yes but no. Do you know how many people call support in legacy industries, ignore the voice prompt, and demand to speak to a person to pay their recurring, same-cost-every-month bill? It is honestly shocking.

There are legitimate support cases that could be made better with AI but just getting to them is honestly harder than I thought when I was first exposed. It will be a while.

discuss

mikkupikku|1 month ago

Demanding a person on the phone use the website on your behalf is a great life hack, I do it all the time. Often they try to turn me away saying "you know you can do this on our website", I just explain that I found it confusing and would like help. If you're polite and pleasant, people will bend over backwards to help you out over the phone.

With "legacy industries" in particular, their websites are usually so busted with short session timeouts/etc that it's worth spending a few minutes on hold to get somebody else to do it.

eightysixfour|1 month ago

Sorry, I disagree here. For the specific flow I'm talking about - monthly recurring payments - the UX is about as highly optimized for success as it gets. There are ways to do it via the web, on the phone with a bot, bill pay in your own bank, set it up in-store, in an app, etc.

These people don't want the thing done, they want to talk to someone on the phone. The monthly payment is an excuse to do so. I know, we did the customer research on it.

nostrebored|1 month ago

There needs to be some element of magic and push back. Every turn has to show that the AI is getting closer to resolving your issue and has synthesized the information you've given it in some way.

We've found that just a "Hey, how can I help?" will get many of these customers to dump every problem they've ever had on you, and if you can make turn two actually productive, then the odds of someone dropping out of the interaction is low.

The difference between "I need to cancel my subscription!" leading to "I can help with that! To find your subscription, what's your phone number?" or "The XYZ subscription you started last year?" is huge.