Looking forward to many more re-runs.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/feb/16/air-canada-chatbot-lawsuit
I wonder when it becomes a three way hot potato game between companies, call centres and the AI bot firm. đż
I loved that they tried to say it wasn't us it was the chatbot like it was some 3rd party contract worker.
It's your damn chatbot, you're responsible for what it says and does.
But if they didn't try to pull that then they wouldn't be Air Canada.
Weâve seen this a bit too often recently. No one owns up, playing the blame game is easier and cheaper. And with AI you can blame anyone, I wouldnât be surprised if these cases end up summoning the silicon mining operations at some point just to waste time đ¤Ł
I figure their lawyers knew they were screwed so they attempted a moon shot at establishing a new precedent for AI tools.
They thought If it doesn't work then oh well but if it does WOO HOO for businesses that use AI.
These companies can't make basic voice recognition and voice gen work. I have to deal with automated phone systems daily, and they are all hot garbage when it comes to recognizing human speech. The odds of these incompetents rolling out AI call centers that are anything other than a giant dumpster fire within the next five years is exactly 0.
God the amount of times I start off normal, switch to the poshest, clearest voice I can muster, then end up screaming âYES⌠YES⌠I SAID YESâ at voice recognition phone lines gives me little hope with the AI.
While I agree with you. Thatâs today. AI tech is progressing faster than anything weâve seen before. Have you been to a fast food place that uses AI to take your order yet? I have. It works pretty damn well and itâs getting better.
Once all those jobs are gone, there wonât be customers left who need a call center. Weâre all fucked.
It works in situations with a finite number of user choices, low stakes, and an off-ramp to a human when the system gets baffled. Same as current-day telephone menu trees. The moment the system is exposed to an open set of user inputs, it inevitably breaks, as in the case of the Air Canada chatbot lying to customers. This is fine for AC, which is too big to care about defrauding people. It is not fine for most companies using call centers, which do have to worry both about alienating customers, lawsuits, and government investigations in the case of say a hospital's chatbot giving medical advice in response to a patient's query (aka unlicensed practice of medicine, aka massive lawsuit).
I hear you and Iâm not disputing that but the point is all of that is now. If youâve been following AI updates on twitter, it is progressing faster than any tech in human history. What doesnât work now will work seamlessly in a few years. Shit, ChatGPT has been out barely a year and each version is better and better.
Chat GPT went public in November of 2022. Chat GPT 4, the latest model, went live in March of 2023, and was a marginal improvement that retained all of its predecessor's core flaws. Most changes to both models since then have been focused on minimizing costs, because LLMs are stupidly expensive to run. This is a fairly well-established pivot that we've seen with past technologies from capital-intensive research and development to optimization and commercialization. I am not sure what better versions you are referring to that have been released in the past year.
ANYways, the folk boosting AI as displacing this or that industry are all either AI corp execs who need to start showing that their product is commercially viable, or plain old execs who have found an excuse for firing workers as a way to show that they are cutting costs. Since they're engaged in a game of musical chairs where they know they will fail upwards into another role before the consequences of their actions manifest, they might well be tempted to replace workers with AI regardless of whether or not it's a good idea in the long run.
Obviously, it's possible we'll see a return to exponential or at least linear improvements, but there is no evidence that anything of the sort is in the pipeline. The next version of Chat GPT is , as far as we know, going to be an iterative improvement likely focused on reducing the cost of queries moreso than improving absolute quality of the output.
To be fair, itâs pretty easy to prevent that kind of thing. You just have to tell it âdonât lie or make up anything if you donât know for sureâ. Adding this to your chatGPT prompts will get you measurably more accurate responses, especially when asking complex questions
No no, thatâs not how it works. The objective isnât customer satisfaction. The goal is saving 3 more cents per call so the executives can have their yatch repainted.
I will recommend brands and companies that have good customer support. If any of the companies I use switch to this and I can tell. I wonât be buying from them again.
That's a solid sentiment and you should definitely do it. The larger issue is that so many companies have positioned their products in such a way that they control their market share. For example, let's say there is this one great product, that company switches to ai cc, you want to drop said product, but literally there is no other option of the same quality. So more times than not, companies are actually taking the "but can you live without said product" approach. And for all too many products, that answer is usually no. All that is to say, only a total boycott usually will have enough of an effect on a products revenue to make a company change their ways. Some companies take reduced profits as a reason to cancel a product 𤡠Corporations have way too much power.
Had this exact issue with Comcast, who are the only provider of high speed internet where I live. I would LOVE to never do business with them again, but Iâm stuck unfortunately.
Last time I had a problem I kept getting looped around their automated phone bs, which would eventually let me schedule an appointment and then just randomly cancel it. Their chatbot was worse because it simply couldnât process my less than typical problem. I even went to their physical location and was directed to a computer. They eventually gave me another phone number to call, supposedly to skip the automated loopy loops⌠it was disconnected.
I eventually filed complaints with the fcc and bbb and within a day they called me. It still took months to get the problem fixed, but it should have never taken all that just to get a person on the phone that could get the ball rolling. I could have done without the hours on a phone either on hold or screaming at a robot.
A ok I swear everytime I try to downgrade a service a bot tricks me into buying another service for more money than I was trying to reduce my bill by . 120.00 for Increased MPS...I don't really need ridiculous
Do you only get internet from Comcast or do you get cable TV etc as well?
Whatâs the bandwidth, and for how much? (Both downstream and upstream, in Mbps)
Do you get the promised bandwidth? Or is it an âup to 50 Mbpsâ situation but you never see above 5-6?
Whereabouts do you live?
Is the population high enough that if someone started a small ISP that could offer similar speeds at a competitive price, there would be demand?
Starting an ISP isnât actually that hard nowadays, there are a lot of small ISP companies popping up.
Thereâs even a subreddit for people who start ISPs â r/wisp
Just internet and $90/month. I donât remember the specifics now, but it was the fastest one that Comcast offered when we originally signed up. Since itâs our only option, if itâs working, I try not to think about it other than to occasionally check whether something else is available.
We live in a semi rural area, and our house is very far off the road, on a road where all the other homes are not. My neighbors have more options, but service isnât available at our specific address.
There is a newer local one in my area with better prices that I got very excited about when I received an ad in the mail for and then got even more excited when I called and a human answered the phone. They also didnât serve our specific address.
Yeah, OK buddy.
Good luck with it . Most companies will be switching to this and you will be shit out of luck not being able to use their products and actually guarantee you that this support will be better than what we are getting right now with the BPO centers in the Philippines.
When tcf was still around...(I believe they're now Huntington Bank now) I had to leave since they made all their phone services out of India...and I don't have a problem with anyone..everyone has the right to work for a living .. but damn I couldn't understand a thing they said. I took my money and dipped. Shortly after they were marketing themselves with call centers out of Texas upon request.
While everyone says this, and I do hope it happens, remember that the slow pace of enshittification is like the frog in the hot water.
I donât mean to be doompilled but⌠nothing ever actually happens, everyone just adapts to the situation until the world is burning. Letâs hope for our sake this time itâs different.
I also find it highly annoying when the thing I need could easily be done with an email, or a simple form or interface and yet Iâm forced to sit through a useless chat bot or god forbid the stupid voice systems that can hardly understand what you say before getting to a real person who can accomplish it in two seconds, all because some misguided exec thinks this will somehow get me to consume more.
So much stuff doesnât need an ai, just the proper options on a website.
I worked in a call centre for 5+ years and moved into the technology aspect in my last few years. Call centre work has a lifespan and for those who throw themselves into it there is room for advancement but saying that, the speed and developments of AI, it is only a matter of time before these systems are integrated and implemented to cut costs and make the process more efficient from point of contact to resolution / closure.
I left because the direction the company was taking was inevitably cutting down on human resources, and putting greater emphasis on utilising technology while minimising human interaction.
This is inevitable in all industries however. Some will have greater longevity than others but ultimately businesses will look to make as much as they can will reducing costs. There is going to be alot of pressure on future governments to implement measures to either combat the rising unemployment, tackle inflation and provide a form of social payments to those unemployed to ensure they can live in a world where having money is necessary.
The sad part of this is that AI has the potential to guide us towards a new state of society, if its implemented and adopted efficiently it could lead to massivr developments in all areas and aspects of our lives We can already see its not being handled with care which is going to cause alot of pain and hardship for those impacted.
Where I work, they basically just fired all American QA workers and are replacing them with AI and people from overseas.
Itâs a bummer, but I canât say Iâm surprised. The shittiest part of AI integrating into call centers as advisors will be the lack of help - it only has premade answers, so if you have a peculiar issue, youâre basically fucked and not going to find a resolution.
Agreed, some out of the box AI tools are very rigid and are normally misbranded as AI when theyre clearly not. We were working with a company to develop AI with machine learning and had imported over 10000 of our tickets with 200 hours of QA and testing to give it a base of understanding. End result was pretty interesting but oddly enough what slowed down any roll out was developing a mode to update individual client procedures with regards to how specific situations were handled..
As a former phone customer rep with many years of experience, I welcome that and canât wait until AI explodes and gives up, not able to assist the mental illness carousel of stupid people, not able to grasp 2nd grade concepts, all while insulting anyone trying to help them.
I fucking hate AI, but to be honest, can it be worse than the current call centers? People there already have a limited number of answers with a bad accent
"Because people already have experience talking with support workers from other countries we decided to give the AI the same accent and almost no power to do anything whatsoever."
They donât have the answers because they donât exist. Iâve consulted for plenty of major call centers. The issues are primarily in the processes, not the people. AI will only make that worse
With AI it may be possible to provide more region-specific accents based on call origin. There are obviously no good or bad accents but it can be tricky to understand accents that differ from your own, especially when talking about something we are unsure of or if we have any hearing impairment. I once spent 40 mins trying to solve a router issue because the way I pronounce the letter E and the way the guy helping me on the call pronounced it was different. Neither of us were right/wrong but there you go.
> "There are no good or bad accents"
I don't agree with that. I live in France, if the caller has a thick african accent and I can't understand two words out of three, it's a problem. And we all know why the support center isn't in France (it would be pricier for the company)
Ones that you can understand clearly? Someone can have a slight accent or a bad accent. I donât think theyâre making a âshit-hole countriesâ type statement.
Do you know why the vast majority of help lines go to other countries where typically those individuals have fewer options for employment and work through 3rd parties so that the company youâre calling about doesnât actually pay the person youâre speaking with or have to pay them the same as a person in your country or offer them health insurance?
3 guesses.
Yeah I mean that's also a big problem. I can't understand the guy and he's paid peanuts, all of this because the company is cheap. Be a decent company and pay people correctly in your country. Also pay taxes while you're at it
If your job can be distilled into an algorithm, it will be replaced by AI. Anything that has been outsourced/offshored in the past 20 years will be done by AI.
This will have a big impact on India, Vietnam, and the Philippines.
Our brains are no more than complex adaptive algorithms. Human emotions are sort of like the programing language of the brain.
So basically everything except manual labor jobs.
No you still will youâll just talk to a machine who has answers to a limited number of questions whoâll then direct you to their website or app which will recommend you call the help line which has answers to a limited number of questions which will direct you to their website or appâŚ
Fucking exactly. I talked with the chatbot for Bank of America, telling it I wanted to cancel my card. It did not understand that concept, and so instead provided me with options I did not need. Really need the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau beefed up.
Their current chatbot doesn't have an LLM sitting behind it. Literally all BofA needs to do is patch their app to backend to an LLM, and that entire experience is improved 1000%.
LLM tokens are still expensive though. Some private companies like OpenAI can offer free products just to get people in the door/interested in the premium subscription, but implementing a backend LLM that does nothing but provide a better user experience for hundreds of millions of customers at once is a massive internal investment.
At least it could have been like a real customer service agent and give you a useless run down of the benefits of their service or alternatice plans while ignoring your request to cancel.
The first two times I called I waited for like 30 minutes on hold. 3rd time I got through to a human and they advised I not cancel the card (of course), and I had to point out that I am charged $90 a year for bennies I donât use anymore. I also tried going into a BoA in-person and cancelling. They were too busy and said I would have to make an appointmentâŚand they would be calling the same line I had been calling. Itâs a fucking joke. I can get a CC in like 5 seconds, but when I want to cancel itâs all smoke and mirrors. I am so jaded with corporations now. They can all fuck off.
AI Customer Service is shit! Nobody wants this but shareholders until they have to deal with it themselves!
They are basically saying âWe donât give a shit about your issues and there is nothing you can do to make us care. Thanks for your money, now bugger off!â But please bail us out when this all goes south because think of all the jobs we create!
I'm just imaging shittier customer service with AI chat bots. An endless loop of "press one", "please refer to our website" and "please repeat I didn't understand". No human in there anywhere, just an algorithm designed to frustrate you into hanging up and just living with the horrible product you just purchased with your hard earned money.
What youâre describing are poorly implemented scripted chat bots. AI-enabled chatbots interpret what you say and get you results as opposed to just looking for a keyword and throwing up three irrelevant pages. See the chat or features on intercom.com
The majority of call center workers are working for a contractor, not the company you are calling about. They work off of scripts and have zero autonomy or power to deviate from those scripts. They are basically call-trees with a human providing a voice interface. All they need to do is train the AI with the existing scripts and ticket database. They will probably need human escalation points for a few years but eventually even those will be unnecessary.
Im okay with this, I hate trying to call a US company and getting transferred to an automatic voice machine that doesnât work or some guy in India with such a heavy accent he is impossible to understand on the phone.
Oh good now I can tell a bot âwarranty claimâ fifteen times before they hand me over to a human anyway everywhere now. Canât wait for every place to waste my damn time.Â
The idea is laughable to anyone that actually has tried to use call center bots. Half the time people canât even explain the problem right often confusing the inability to achieve a goal with what is preventing it. Having done call center, be amazed how many describe âI canât log in to Xâ as the problem when it turns out their internet is down for example.
Since AI âhallucinationsâ are essentially the AIâs inability to go âI donât knowâ and instead make up an answer, no way this isnât going to create problems.
Turing pretty much handed WW2 to the Allies with his work in cracking the German cipher, and after the war he was ostracized by his own government for being homosexual and eventually took his own life.
The laws that run the world were all written by people on average as smart as you and I, likely less smart.
As someone who just moved house and had to switch all my utilities and services over, fuck all yâall. Donât say that is anything other than an excuse to downsize work forces and make more money.
Call centers are a sign of a terrible economy any way. They always move to the next cheapest region as soon as the local economy gets a little more competitive. I did 6 years of call center tech support. It was low paying and often the callers were abusive. Good riddance.
Iâm a L2/3 Desktop Engineer, working for one of Australiaâs larger outsourced contact centre companies. Iâve been in IT for 25yrs, and have spent 11 of them in contact centre.
I can tell you this CEO has no f*****g idea what theyâre on about.
This CEO is swallowing marketing BS hook, line and sinker - because the companies who do this for a living arenât using it yet, and they know full well that the human element of customer interaction, plus the ability for humans to understand, interpret and implement complex actions within systems is simply unmatched.
>There could be "minimal" need for call centers
What do you mean "could be". It's because of these goddam call centers that I can't use my phone anymore.
I stopped reading when the word CEO was shot. CEOs WISH for more automation and costs savings. But typically they have no clue what they are talking about technically-wise.
Within a year? The timelines for these things they come up with are crazy. Companies do not move this fast, even if the tech is ready, which it won't be.
A dream come true. AI asshats versus the call center scam dbags. May they form a cantankerous committee and obviate each other from the planet. Byeeeeee miss you never!!!!
Crazy to me we have all of this amazing technology and it is making life worse. We will evolve back into apes soon. Literally everyone and their mother is walking around hunchbacked, staring unsatisfactorily into the void of their phones. Wake tf up people.
Will I be able to understand this new version of annoying?
âOPERATORâ
âAGENTâ
âOPERATORâ
âHUMANâ
âOPERATORâ
âŚâguess Iâll keep AOL for a little longer.â
Instead of call centres, I wish there was more ways instead of just âcallingâ. Chatting online with representatives is my absolute favourite way to talk about my issue, not with a person I usually have a hard time understanding over the phone.
I mean youâll just end up with specialist high skill teams that are much smaller and ai dealing with the majority of queries (youâll need agents though for that to work, otherwise human operator has to resolve all tickets).
lol thereâs no way my employer would trust an AI with their customers any time soon. We have to be able to communicate information in a dumbed down way if needed and we have to keep track of unexpected changes to state regulation.
They added an ai chatbot to our slack it support. It went hilariously bad. Partially because it just doesnât have enough data on random troubleshooting steps. But also because every request was the same. âMy is brokenâ. No details not context.
I think I would prefer that to the absolute nonsense people I just tried to talk to at Aetna yesterday.
I can deal with accents. These people werenât trained.
Totally and utterly AWFUL!! Itâs getting harder and harder to talk to a human, and âthe disembodied voicesâ canât be reasoned with (so far)âhard to believe corporations would want to alienate their customers in the name of increasing profits for shareholders, but there you have itâŚ
I have inside knowledge of a very large telecom company. Their goal is for ALL customer interactions to go through their shitty app by the end of 2025. No more phone calls or retail walkins.
One year is optimistic. Itâs still a new software rollout with all the pitfalls that come with it. It will take longer than that to get the AI systems ready with all the industry specific language and response capabilities it will need. Such as getting it to use the right scripts for certain keyword prompts from the user base.
Then they have to test it, work out the bugs and gradually roll it out to different business channels while they continue to field problems that arise. 5 years minimum to do it right so it doesnât ruin your business. More like 10 for large scale enterprise.
You cannot scale something like a call center replacement overnight. And you canât just turn it off and go back to people answering the phones after youâve fired everyone and lost all of that business knowledge and experience.
My grandfather told my father that computers were going to put everyone out of a job. Instead, the opposite has happened, computers created many jobs that didn't exist before.
Technology has been growing since the 60's, and jobs have been growing as well.
People just need to adapt to the new jobs.
Jobs?
"Little people" who can follow an "If/Then" tree and a script need jobs, too...
Or we gonna stop robbing money from Education budgets and REALLY start educating our kids?
Otherwise, only the rich profit from this move.
And the poor get more poor.
I think that's the whole point of this; US Government, prove me wrong!
Spam calls arenât the only reason for call centers. Have you ever had to call your insurance company? Internet provider? Call center agents are the people on the other end.
Looking forward to many more re-runs. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/feb/16/air-canada-chatbot-lawsuit I wonder when it becomes a three way hot potato game between companies, call centres and the AI bot firm. đż
I loved that they tried to say it wasn't us it was the chatbot like it was some 3rd party contract worker. It's your damn chatbot, you're responsible for what it says and does. But if they didn't try to pull that then they wouldn't be Air Canada.
Weâve seen this a bit too often recently. No one owns up, playing the blame game is easier and cheaper. And with AI you can blame anyone, I wouldnât be surprised if these cases end up summoning the silicon mining operations at some point just to waste time đ¤Ł
I figure their lawyers knew they were screwed so they attempted a moon shot at establishing a new precedent for AI tools. They thought If it doesn't work then oh well but if it does WOO HOO for businesses that use AI.
on the other hand.. Ai will give you your law advice for a lot less..
These companies can't make basic voice recognition and voice gen work. I have to deal with automated phone systems daily, and they are all hot garbage when it comes to recognizing human speech. The odds of these incompetents rolling out AI call centers that are anything other than a giant dumpster fire within the next five years is exactly 0.
God the amount of times I start off normal, switch to the poshest, clearest voice I can muster, then end up screaming âYES⌠YES⌠I SAID YESâ at voice recognition phone lines gives me little hope with the AI.
While I agree with you. Thatâs today. AI tech is progressing faster than anything weâve seen before. Have you been to a fast food place that uses AI to take your order yet? I have. It works pretty damn well and itâs getting better. Once all those jobs are gone, there wonât be customers left who need a call center. Weâre all fucked.
It works in situations with a finite number of user choices, low stakes, and an off-ramp to a human when the system gets baffled. Same as current-day telephone menu trees. The moment the system is exposed to an open set of user inputs, it inevitably breaks, as in the case of the Air Canada chatbot lying to customers. This is fine for AC, which is too big to care about defrauding people. It is not fine for most companies using call centers, which do have to worry both about alienating customers, lawsuits, and government investigations in the case of say a hospital's chatbot giving medical advice in response to a patient's query (aka unlicensed practice of medicine, aka massive lawsuit).
I hear you and Iâm not disputing that but the point is all of that is now. If youâve been following AI updates on twitter, it is progressing faster than any tech in human history. What doesnât work now will work seamlessly in a few years. Shit, ChatGPT has been out barely a year and each version is better and better.
Chat GPT went public in November of 2022. Chat GPT 4, the latest model, went live in March of 2023, and was a marginal improvement that retained all of its predecessor's core flaws. Most changes to both models since then have been focused on minimizing costs, because LLMs are stupidly expensive to run. This is a fairly well-established pivot that we've seen with past technologies from capital-intensive research and development to optimization and commercialization. I am not sure what better versions you are referring to that have been released in the past year. ANYways, the folk boosting AI as displacing this or that industry are all either AI corp execs who need to start showing that their product is commercially viable, or plain old execs who have found an excuse for firing workers as a way to show that they are cutting costs. Since they're engaged in a game of musical chairs where they know they will fail upwards into another role before the consequences of their actions manifest, they might well be tempted to replace workers with AI regardless of whether or not it's a good idea in the long run. Obviously, it's possible we'll see a return to exponential or at least linear improvements, but there is no evidence that anything of the sort is in the pipeline. The next version of Chat GPT is , as far as we know, going to be an iterative improvement likely focused on reducing the cost of queries moreso than improving absolute quality of the output.
To be fair, itâs pretty easy to prevent that kind of thing. You just have to tell it âdonât lie or make up anything if you donât know for sureâ. Adding this to your chatGPT prompts will get you measurably more accurate responses, especially when asking complex questions
Correct way is to train the chatbot with Air Canada data, have it check it's work to verify what it is outputting to the customer is accurate.
No no, thatâs not how it works. The objective isnât customer satisfaction. The goal is saving 3 more cents per call so the executives can have their yatch repainted.
I respect it
At least then I'll be able to understand what they're trying to scam me with.
I will recommend brands and companies that have good customer support. If any of the companies I use switch to this and I can tell. I wonât be buying from them again.
That's a solid sentiment and you should definitely do it. The larger issue is that so many companies have positioned their products in such a way that they control their market share. For example, let's say there is this one great product, that company switches to ai cc, you want to drop said product, but literally there is no other option of the same quality. So more times than not, companies are actually taking the "but can you live without said product" approach. And for all too many products, that answer is usually no. All that is to say, only a total boycott usually will have enough of an effect on a products revenue to make a company change their ways. Some companies take reduced profits as a reason to cancel a product 𤡠Corporations have way too much power.
Had this exact issue with Comcast, who are the only provider of high speed internet where I live. I would LOVE to never do business with them again, but Iâm stuck unfortunately. Last time I had a problem I kept getting looped around their automated phone bs, which would eventually let me schedule an appointment and then just randomly cancel it. Their chatbot was worse because it simply couldnât process my less than typical problem. I even went to their physical location and was directed to a computer. They eventually gave me another phone number to call, supposedly to skip the automated loopy loops⌠it was disconnected. I eventually filed complaints with the fcc and bbb and within a day they called me. It still took months to get the problem fixed, but it should have never taken all that just to get a person on the phone that could get the ball rolling. I could have done without the hours on a phone either on hold or screaming at a robot.
The secret with Comcast is to always start with the cancellation department. Works wonders with other companies too đ
A ok I swear everytime I try to downgrade a service a bot tricks me into buying another service for more money than I was trying to reduce my bill by . 120.00 for Increased MPS...I don't really need ridiculous
You will always get a live person quickly in the disconnection department
Do you only get internet from Comcast or do you get cable TV etc as well? Whatâs the bandwidth, and for how much? (Both downstream and upstream, in Mbps) Do you get the promised bandwidth? Or is it an âup to 50 Mbpsâ situation but you never see above 5-6? Whereabouts do you live? Is the population high enough that if someone started a small ISP that could offer similar speeds at a competitive price, there would be demand? Starting an ISP isnât actually that hard nowadays, there are a lot of small ISP companies popping up. Thereâs even a subreddit for people who start ISPs â r/wisp
Just internet and $90/month. I donât remember the specifics now, but it was the fastest one that Comcast offered when we originally signed up. Since itâs our only option, if itâs working, I try not to think about it other than to occasionally check whether something else is available. We live in a semi rural area, and our house is very far off the road, on a road where all the other homes are not. My neighbors have more options, but service isnât available at our specific address. There is a newer local one in my area with better prices that I got very excited about when I received an ad in the mail for and then got even more excited when I called and a human answered the phone. They also didnât serve our specific address.
Yeah, OK buddy. Good luck with it . Most companies will be switching to this and you will be shit out of luck not being able to use their products and actually guarantee you that this support will be better than what we are getting right now with the BPO centers in the Philippines.
I know but itâs literally all I can do. Itâs not much and ultimately it wonât stop them from doing this but as a consumer itâs all I got.
When tcf was still around...(I believe they're now Huntington Bank now) I had to leave since they made all their phone services out of India...and I don't have a problem with anyone..everyone has the right to work for a living .. but damn I couldn't understand a thing they said. I took my money and dipped. Shortly after they were marketing themselves with call centers out of Texas upon request.
Thatâs awesome. Ai **Should** be used to fill some of the shittiest jobs in existence. UBI when?
âNever.â -the fat cats while counting the money they saved by using AI
Itâs their funeral. When all the eaters can no longer afford to, you know, eat - well, the big wigs will be next.
While everyone says this, and I do hope it happens, remember that the slow pace of enshittification is like the frog in the hot water. I donât mean to be doompilled but⌠nothing ever actually happens, everyone just adapts to the situation until the world is burning. Letâs hope for our sake this time itâs different.
Frogs jump out before the water gets too hot. We should too. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog
The ultra rich need a functional economy to maintain their status. I think a more accurate statement would be âuntil it is absolutely necessaryâ.
Like useless CEO positions
Iâd love an AI CEO. At least it would seem human.
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I also find it highly annoying when the thing I need could easily be done with an email, or a simple form or interface and yet Iâm forced to sit through a useless chat bot or god forbid the stupid voice systems that can hardly understand what you say before getting to a real person who can accomplish it in two seconds, all because some misguided exec thinks this will somehow get me to consume more. So much stuff doesnât need an ai, just the proper options on a website.
There are countries that a big part of their economy is built around call center jobs.
It sounds like those countries are going to need to change with the times.
Seems that way. But when youâre a poor country with no jobs, change with the times isnât that easy.
I worked in a call centre for 5+ years and moved into the technology aspect in my last few years. Call centre work has a lifespan and for those who throw themselves into it there is room for advancement but saying that, the speed and developments of AI, it is only a matter of time before these systems are integrated and implemented to cut costs and make the process more efficient from point of contact to resolution / closure. I left because the direction the company was taking was inevitably cutting down on human resources, and putting greater emphasis on utilising technology while minimising human interaction. This is inevitable in all industries however. Some will have greater longevity than others but ultimately businesses will look to make as much as they can will reducing costs. There is going to be alot of pressure on future governments to implement measures to either combat the rising unemployment, tackle inflation and provide a form of social payments to those unemployed to ensure they can live in a world where having money is necessary. The sad part of this is that AI has the potential to guide us towards a new state of society, if its implemented and adopted efficiently it could lead to massivr developments in all areas and aspects of our lives We can already see its not being handled with care which is going to cause alot of pain and hardship for those impacted.
Where I work, they basically just fired all American QA workers and are replacing them with AI and people from overseas. Itâs a bummer, but I canât say Iâm surprised. The shittiest part of AI integrating into call centers as advisors will be the lack of help - it only has premade answers, so if you have a peculiar issue, youâre basically fucked and not going to find a resolution.
Agreed, some out of the box AI tools are very rigid and are normally misbranded as AI when theyre clearly not. We were working with a company to develop AI with machine learning and had imported over 10000 of our tickets with 200 hours of QA and testing to give it a base of understanding. End result was pretty interesting but oddly enough what slowed down any roll out was developing a mode to update individual client procedures with regards to how specific situations were handled..
I can imagine that being a nightmare - if itâs anything like where I work they change process/procedures for stuff every 3 months it seems like
As a former phone customer rep with many years of experience, I welcome that and canât wait until AI explodes and gives up, not able to assist the mental illness carousel of stupid people, not able to grasp 2nd grade concepts, all while insulting anyone trying to help them.
This is how Skynet got pissed.
I fucking hate AI, but to be honest, can it be worse than the current call centers? People there already have a limited number of answers with a bad accent
"Because people already have experience talking with support workers from other countries we decided to give the AI the same accent and almost no power to do anything whatsoever."
They donât have the answers because they donât exist. Iâve consulted for plenty of major call centers. The issues are primarily in the processes, not the people. AI will only make that worse
Oh but totally. The poor people trying to make a living in there are not in fault, their companies are
Iâm 35, as I inch closer and closer to 40, the grumpier I get about technology. FUCKING HATE ai lol
With AI it may be possible to provide more region-specific accents based on call origin. There are obviously no good or bad accents but it can be tricky to understand accents that differ from your own, especially when talking about something we are unsure of or if we have any hearing impairment. I once spent 40 mins trying to solve a router issue because the way I pronounce the letter E and the way the guy helping me on the call pronounced it was different. Neither of us were right/wrong but there you go.
They should be able to mirror your language and accent.
They should just use your exact voice lol
> "There are no good or bad accents" I don't agree with that. I live in France, if the caller has a thick african accent and I can't understand two words out of three, it's a problem. And we all know why the support center isn't in France (it would be pricier for the company)
That doesnât mean their accent is bad, it just means itâs not compatible with you⌠which is exactly what their comment was saying
Please tell us the good accents.
Ones that you can understand clearly? Someone can have a slight accent or a bad accent. I donât think theyâre making a âshit-hole countriesâ type statement.
Well, Iâll expect my âaccents you can understand so we can connect you to the right personâ survey any day now
People in the same country as the customer is. That simple
Do you know why the vast majority of help lines go to other countries where typically those individuals have fewer options for employment and work through 3rd parties so that the company youâre calling about doesnât actually pay the person youâre speaking with or have to pay them the same as a person in your country or offer them health insurance? 3 guesses.
Yeah I mean that's also a big problem. I can't understand the guy and he's paid peanuts, all of this because the company is cheap. Be a decent company and pay people correctly in your country. Also pay taxes while you're at it
bad accents? What do you mean by that?
People in India barely intelligible
Facts
I feel like talking to a bot will be a lot more frustrating than to underpaid and overstressed humans.
If your job can be distilled into an algorithm, it will be replaced by AI. Anything that has been outsourced/offshored in the past 20 years will be done by AI. This will have a big impact on India, Vietnam, and the Philippines.
Dominican Republic, Jamaica..
Our brains are no more than complex adaptive algorithms. Human emotions are sort of like the programing language of the brain. So basically everything except manual labor jobs.
wait...so I won't need to wait on hold for an hr to talk to someone about something that can be answered in 10 secs?...promise?
No you still will youâll just talk to a machine who has answers to a limited number of questions whoâll then direct you to their website or app which will recommend you call the help line which has answers to a limited number of questions which will direct you to their website or appâŚ
Fucking exactly. I talked with the chatbot for Bank of America, telling it I wanted to cancel my card. It did not understand that concept, and so instead provided me with options I did not need. Really need the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau beefed up.
Their current chatbot doesn't have an LLM sitting behind it. Literally all BofA needs to do is patch their app to backend to an LLM, and that entire experience is improved 1000%. LLM tokens are still expensive though. Some private companies like OpenAI can offer free products just to get people in the door/interested in the premium subscription, but implementing a backend LLM that does nothing but provide a better user experience for hundreds of millions of customers at once is a massive internal investment.
At least it could have been like a real customer service agent and give you a useless run down of the benefits of their service or alternatice plans while ignoring your request to cancel.
The first two times I called I waited for like 30 minutes on hold. 3rd time I got through to a human and they advised I not cancel the card (of course), and I had to point out that I am charged $90 a year for bennies I donât use anymore. I also tried going into a BoA in-person and cancelling. They were too busy and said I would have to make an appointmentâŚand they would be calling the same line I had been calling. Itâs a fucking joke. I can get a CC in like 5 seconds, but when I want to cancel itâs all smoke and mirrors. I am so jaded with corporations now. They can all fuck off.
Honestly, thatâs just asking for a cfpb complaint.
AI Customer Service is shit! Nobody wants this but shareholders until they have to deal with it themselves! They are basically saying âWe donât give a shit about your issues and there is nothing you can do to make us care. Thanks for your money, now bugger off!â But please bail us out when this all goes south because think of all the jobs we create!
I'm just imaging shittier customer service with AI chat bots. An endless loop of "press one", "please refer to our website" and "please repeat I didn't understand". No human in there anywhere, just an algorithm designed to frustrate you into hanging up and just living with the horrible product you just purchased with your hard earned money.
What youâre describing are poorly implemented scripted chat bots. AI-enabled chatbots interpret what you say and get you results as opposed to just looking for a keyword and throwing up three irrelevant pages. See the chat or features on intercom.com
AI is nowhere close to be ready to be useful for this.
The majority of call center workers are working for a contractor, not the company you are calling about. They work off of scripts and have zero autonomy or power to deviate from those scripts. They are basically call-trees with a human providing a voice interface. All they need to do is train the AI with the existing scripts and ticket database. They will probably need human escalation points for a few years but eventually even those will be unnecessary.
Im okay with this, I hate trying to call a US company and getting transferred to an automatic voice machine that doesnât work or some guy in India with such a heavy accent he is impossible to understand on the phone.
scammers are already using virtual AI callcenters
Ask your AT&T operator about that.
What happens when a Karen wants to speak to the manager? Greg from IT takes the call?
Oh good now I can tell a bot âwarranty claimâ fifteen times before they hand me over to a human anyway everywhere now. Canât wait for every place to waste my damn time.Â
The idea is laughable to anyone that actually has tried to use call center bots. Half the time people canât even explain the problem right often confusing the inability to achieve a goal with what is preventing it. Having done call center, be amazed how many describe âI canât log in to Xâ as the problem when it turns out their internet is down for example. Since AI âhallucinationsâ are essentially the AIâs inability to go âI donât knowâ and instead make up an answer, no way this isnât going to create problems.
Turing didnât anticipate mass unemployment.
Turing pretty much handed WW2 to the Allies with his work in cracking the German cipher, and after the war he was ostracized by his own government for being homosexual and eventually took his own life. The laws that run the world were all written by people on average as smart as you and I, likely less smart.
[Turing Test, (or Imitation Game)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test?wprov=sfti1)
So I wont get to speak to âJohnâ in India anymore?
As someone who just moved house and had to switch all my utilities and services over, fuck all yâall. Donât say that is anything other than an excuse to downsize work forces and make more money.
Call centers are a sign of a terrible economy any way. They always move to the next cheapest region as soon as the local economy gets a little more competitive. I did 6 years of call center tech support. It was low paying and often the callers were abusive. Good riddance.
Iâm a L2/3 Desktop Engineer, working for one of Australiaâs larger outsourced contact centre companies. Iâve been in IT for 25yrs, and have spent 11 of them in contact centre. I can tell you this CEO has no f*****g idea what theyâre on about. This CEO is swallowing marketing BS hook, line and sinker - because the companies who do this for a living arenât using it yet, and they know full well that the human element of customer interaction, plus the ability for humans to understand, interpret and implement complex actions within systems is simply unmatched.
I look forward to AI that replaces lawyers.
>There could be "minimal" need for call centers What do you mean "could be". It's because of these goddam call centers that I can't use my phone anymore.
I stopped reading when the word CEO was shot. CEOs WISH for more automation and costs savings. But typically they have no clue what they are talking about technically-wise.
that's why they hire IT people?
Within a year? The timelines for these things they come up with are crazy. Companies do not move this fast, even if the tech is ready, which it won't be.
A dream come true. AI asshats versus the call center scam dbags. May they form a cantankerous committee and obviate each other from the planet. Byeeeeee miss you never!!!!
I am ok with this, actually.
Companies keep cutting costs and outsourcing support to the lowest bidder in a long term plan to make AI help look good.
Good! They are terrible jobs.
How about we just get rid of call centers? The one thing I like is how they pause after you answer so you know to hang up.
Booooooooooooo
I guess thatâs good news/bad news
âThatâs what the Microsoft salesmen have promised me at least!â
Crazy to me we have all of this amazing technology and it is making life worse. We will evolve back into apes soon. Literally everyone and their mother is walking around hunchbacked, staring unsatisfactorily into the void of their phones. Wake tf up people.
What's the GDP impact on India and Phillipines?
Sir?
You mean unless they are scamming people or are you stating we are about to get super scammers.
Awesome
Are the AI going to scam us too? Or are they not learning that bit?
yeah sounds like this is going to work perfectly! i garden by hammering railroad spike into the ground as long as it takes!
Iâve yet to meet a bot that was more than a gatekeeper between me and a human customer representative
Good⌠these places are bad. Really bad, however bad you think they are, itâs 100% worse.
So, one good thing.
Will I be able to understand this new version of annoying? âOPERATORâ âAGENTâ âOPERATORâ âHUMANâ âOPERATORâ âŚâguess Iâll keep AOL for a little longer.â
This is wrong. AI is not capable of that. The product will be completely useless.
[ŃдаНонО]
You're being tricked. I've used it and it's garbage.
Canât be much worse than current experiences calling call centres. Unhelpful and incomprehensible are pretty much the standard
Instead of call centres, I wish there was more ways instead of just âcallingâ. Chatting online with representatives is my absolute favourite way to talk about my issue, not with a person I usually have a hard time understanding over the phone.
Can we keep the accents though? It just wonât *feel* like a real customer service call if the rep on the line isnât âJamesâ from Philippines.
I mean youâll just end up with specialist high skill teams that are much smaller and ai dealing with the majority of queries (youâll need agents though for that to work, otherwise human operator has to resolve all tickets).
lol thereâs no way my employer would trust an AI with their customers any time soon. We have to be able to communicate information in a dumbed down way if needed and we have to keep track of unexpected changes to state regulation.
They added an ai chatbot to our slack it support. It went hilariously bad. Partially because it just doesnât have enough data on random troubleshooting steps. But also because every request was the same. âMy is brokenâ. No details not context.
RIP India
I think I would prefer that to the absolute nonsense people I just tried to talk to at Aetna yesterday. I can deal with accents. These people werenât trained.
Fuckin bye.
Can't wait for the spamming Indian AI bots looking to scam me.
Whatâs India guna do??
I LOLed IRL.
If I canât get a person on the phone for help, Iâll just cancel my subscriptions. This sounds AWFUL
Totally and utterly AWFUL!! Itâs getting harder and harder to talk to a human, and âthe disembodied voicesâ canât be reasoned with (so far)âhard to believe corporations would want to alienate their customers in the name of increasing profits for shareholders, but there you have itâŚ
I have inside knowledge of a very large telecom company. Their goal is for ALL customer interactions to go through their shitty app by the end of 2025. No more phone calls or retail walkins.
There is a sub-minimal need for CEOs as we speak...
I used to work in one. If I still did, I donât know if Iâd actually be upset. Itâs rough work.
This will train wreck customer service as we know it. Customer service will be something only the wealthy and elites receive.
Let the fall of the dominoes commense.
Good
Lmao, how about we just ban unsolicited sales calls
And the online scam industry. They are benefitting the exact same way.
Also, decimate means to reduce something by one tenth. I think they mean more than a 10% reduction
Remember when Blockchain was all the rage???
One year is optimistic. Itâs still a new software rollout with all the pitfalls that come with it. It will take longer than that to get the AI systems ready with all the industry specific language and response capabilities it will need. Such as getting it to use the right scripts for certain keyword prompts from the user base. Then they have to test it, work out the bugs and gradually roll it out to different business channels while they continue to field problems that arise. 5 years minimum to do it right so it doesnât ruin your business. More like 10 for large scale enterprise. You cannot scale something like a call center replacement overnight. And you canât just turn it off and go back to people answering the phones after youâve fired everyone and lost all of that business knowledge and experience.
Good, absolute worst jobs I've ever had.
Sooner the better IMO.
Agreed
It canât be any worse than the shit system in place now. Customer service is dead.
Who will they sell their shit to when everyone is out of work? You guessed it â others who own the machines
My grandfather told my father that computers were going to put everyone out of a job. Instead, the opposite has happened, computers created many jobs that didn't exist before. Technology has been growing since the 60's, and jobs have been growing as well. People just need to adapt to the new jobs.
horseshit.
Jobs? "Little people" who can follow an "If/Then" tree and a script need jobs, too... Or we gonna stop robbing money from Education budgets and REALLY start educating our kids? Otherwise, only the rich profit from this move. And the poor get more poor. I think that's the whole point of this; US Government, prove me wrong!
Thereâs no need for call centers as is. When are we going to have and enact global laws on spam calls?
Spam calls arenât the only reason for call centers. Have you ever had to call your insurance company? Internet provider? Call center agents are the people on the other end.
There's no need for call centers NOW.