I might be the only one that’s kind of optimistic this will improve some of the cheapest call centers.
Some of them … the people have such thick accents, don’t get any local references, the connection is bad, don’t know the first thing about the subject matter, etc.
I called my health insurance company one time because CVS said my vaccine wasn’t covered there; the lady on the other end of the phone I could barely understand and I had to explain to her that CVS is a pharmacy. She still didn’t give me any helpful information. Eventually via poking around the website or something like that, I found out my insurance company doesn’t cover pharmacist administered vaccines … which is just insane to me.
Doesn’t sound insane to me, sounds like a perfect example of the state of the US healthcare system. I stopped paying for healthcare 2 years ago, best decision I ever made.
Just to note, it’s not free, it’s not magic, it’s just better regulated. I’ve lived in a few countries with socialized healthcare, and we still pay insurance. It’s just a lot less since we don’t have to cover ever-increasing insurance profits, and there is no such thing as “out of network” as long as you don’t leave the country (and the rest of the EU).
My premium is 116 EUR for full coverage per month, with no maximum coverage or any other fees, and every healthcare institution in the EU is going to treat me for that in an emergency, for no additional charge. If I need extended treatment, I will get transported to the institution that’s most convenient for me (and thus, the system), and be treated there. Dental, mental healthcare included.
I still pay for some OTC medicine, but prices are kept low.
Your premium is 116 EUR per month, plus the taxes people pay – which are much higher in those countries.
You have also traded your freedom.
The UK is currently talking about banning tobacco entirely in the name of reducing health costs despite it being a part of many cultures ceremonies and traditions. New York is still trying to control soda sizes in the name of public health. Canada now offers suicide as an option for people who would have a long (and costly) treatment with low probability of improving health.
Your premium is 116 EUR per month, plus the taxes people pay – which are much higher in those countries.
Nope, our system is exactly like the US system, except properly regulated. It’s still private insurance, I pay a private company for medical insurance and make claims when I need to use the system. We just didn’t let the industry grow as a cancer on people.
You have also traded your freedom.
What freedom did I trade away?
About the taxes, yes, I might pay more of them, but at the same time when I got burned out by my workplace, I could leave, get mental healthcare, rest, and get back into work on my own terms. I had no financial problems from doing any part of this whatsoever. What is that if it’s not freedom?
I lead a happy and easy life. I am not rich by any means, I have a middle class existence, but can pay for nice travel holidays, hobbies, whatever. I don’t know what exactly the US could give me except a constant anxiety from guns being everywhere, school shootings, a semi-fascistic government sliding further and further into tyrannny, and no public services whatsoever.
The UK is currently talking about banning tobacco entirely
The US is “talking about” stopping the whole democracy charade and installing a dictator. The fact that it’s being talked about by a few members of the government does not make it inevitable or even likely.
New York is still trying to control soda sizes in the name of public health.
I hope so! I mean, I don’t think that anyone should be prevented in going home, making a huge soda and dying of sugar overdose, but it is nobody’s interest to be served one litre soda cups just so that they can feel how “generous” McDonald’s is while they get addicted to sugar.
Canada now offers suicide as an option for people who would have a long (and costly) treatment with low probability of improving health.
While the US just bankrupts them and leaves the suicide part to them. Also, are you bringing up an example of a state not providing adequate care to justify abolishing all socialized healthcare altogether?
It’s not magic, but there will never be a life saving treatment that ruins you financially here in the EU. And travel insurance is dirt cheap here as well.
Call centres exist because people can’t get the help they need by searching. Take away call centres, and you’re just making it more difficult for customers.
Remember back in the early days of the internet, when FAQs had frequently asked questions, and were updated in response to calls? Pepperidge farms remembers.
Uhh they’ve all been outsourced to India for ages now, and they’re effectively useless. You’ll get someone who’s worse than an AI at understanding what you’re asking and cannot deviate from a scrip because they have no training.
I haven’t used one in over a decade, if I have an issue it’s going as an email or a comment on social media.
Every hour of every day, because company won’t hire or pay for anything better.
Press 3 to have a representative call you back; You won’t lose your place in line.
Sure. Meanwhile, I get on their website and try their weird “chat” support popup, that somehow takes care of the problem hours before I ever get a call back.
This is why people hate phone support. And why I don’t trust and won’t buy products from companies who only have phone support (or “social media”, Facebook, Twixer). Give me a dedicated support email address, or something text-based (live chat, contact form) on website, thanks!
Weird. I’m only looking for phone support when there is no online support, or it doesn’t help, or can’t understand the problem, or there’s no keywords that put it in the right area, or for whatever reason is too “smart” so doesn’t work on iPhone. I don’t trust companies that don’t have call support, because they are more blatantly not supporting their products
Do you understand that providing some examples of the opposite doesn’t show “all”? Your goal is supposed to be proving the examples I gave wrong, not adding new examples, because I’m not the one that said “all”. So what we’ve learned today is that different companies are doing different things and that blanket uninformed statements don’t contribute to anything. Cool. You good?
Oh and if you want to use the ampersand for etc you don’t need the t. Ampersand is “e” and “t” together! I hope I’ve helped whatever goal you had in choosing to write “&tc”.
My goal is to show that anyone can post links to news articles.
Unless you’re going to post some in-depth pubmed study or other reputable source of knowledge that shows categorically that the new norm is companies no longer outsourcing their call centres in favour of domestic ones - I will continue to think the default action these days is, as it has been for the past 2 decades now, outsourcing to cheap labour.
I don’t need to engage with them to know nothing has changed in this regard. Capitalism prides itself on seeking the lowest cost option at the expense of the consumer.
I didn’t know who to side with but you’ve switched to a deceptive argument so I’m not giving you thy benefit of thy doubt anymore.
It’s very clear he’s using common English usage of all to mean significant majority, pretending not to understand this and trying to win on semantics makes it seem like you’re an untrustworthy orator.
Can’t even describe how shitty meta support is. I ordered a quest 3 and some additionals, they mailed me everything except the quest and something else I didn’t order. Obvious mix-up, yeah? Well it took 4 different support chats and 6 different “specialists” over a month to actually process a refund, and they were still somehow stuck on the idea that the courier missed a box. An additional box under the same tracking number as another box that was labeled 1 of 1.
Never, and I repeat NEVER, buy directly from most manufacturers. For whatever reason, their customer service on the consumer purchase side always seems to suck. Buy from authorized resellers who care more about the relationship with their customers.
Did… my dad the used car salesman write this? Your post sounds plausible, but… sorry, NO ONE cares about relationships with customers. Every last company is enshittifiable & thus inherently untrustworthy
I have experience on the reseller side of the electronics business. I will tell you that most big resellers (Amazon, Walmart, Best Buy, etc) will do more in situations like this than the actual companies themselves. I’ve seen it a lot. Sure, it’s anecdotal evidence, but I’ve also read a ton of complaints over the years on Reddit of similar situations.
These first party manufacturers are manufacturers first and retail shops second (or third) so they put less effort on that side.
Oh, I’ve been called by my cell operator today. Realized it’s a bot when it offered to upgrade my plan because I’ve used more than half of it. It’s 28th of this month FFS! I asked whether that’s what they mean and why would I need that, it just repeated in the same voice.
You’d be surprised how often we can automate a customers enquiry with ML (not even generative AI). Humans are still there as a fallback, but it’s a way better experience to give instant help to the person if possible and then put them into the queue if they have a more complicated problem. Searching is not really in the same context as automating customer queries, although I guess it could depend on the domain to an extent.
We use a home grown classification model for our customer facing stuff. There are some applications of LLMs we are using a SaaS for as it’s quick to get going but we are also working on fine tuning an open source model as well so we’ll see what ends up working better in terms of cost vs performance. That’s not going to be customer facing though, we don’t serve any generated text to customers.
If a request is simple and common enough that the request can be automated, then it is most likely something that I’m already pissed off about having to call in about since it should have been a feature on the company’s website.
Yes but how often do you call? People like us make up like 1% of their calls, 90% come from people asking ‘how do I download the Google?’ or ‘I saved a picture of my cat where did it go?’ and 9% is people with general questions they could have found online but they didn’t want to get into it.
We handle support in our company as part of our day to day. By and large the bulk of support is people simply leaning on us, rather than relying on common sense, or using the docs. Only a small percent is what would be considered essential.
However, each industry is different. This is just ours.
Generative AI could easily help the bulk of our support load.
We’re experimenting with retrieval augmented generation for early inquiries right now. We get hundreds of inquiries that could be answered by looking at the website/docs and Q&A models with extractive or abstract approaches, or newer generative approaches are good at handling them.
Looked at four models last week, 2 vendors and 2 open source solutions, it’s very promising. Very high accuracy with extractive approaches to simple queries, an email answering bot that links to our live website, along with an offer to talk to a real person could help us out a lot.
I know this isn’t a common takeaway, but I’m all for it.
The current state of call centers is EXCRUCIATINGLY painful for consumers and only exists in the form it does to commodify US for the company. We tolerate the shit experience of call centers, so companies don’t need to pay more money to give us a better experience. That’s why they exist, the only reason. If firing them all and turning them into AI makes the experience even SLIGHTLY less painful than calling your local public assistance help line, I’m all for it. If I can bypass 4 separate phone tree selection menus with 3 minutes of wait time with the crackling loud wait music between being passed around departments, I’m all for it. These are shit dead end jobs with no upside whatsoever.
The fact that generative AI is being used as a means of large corporations consolidating even more wealth rather than attempting to free the working class from shitty, menial jobs shows that we’re way the fuck off with how we conceptualize of “work”.
This should be a good thing, but for lots of people this will suck.
I will not be shedding a tear if people no longer have to work in such a soul crushing menial job. Fuck around and findout what happens millions of people lose their jobs all at once.
but anyway this is just some more ai hype stock manipulation shit.
First of all, it will make cold calling way, way worse. Time to ramp up restrictions, fines and other penalties for that kind of stuff.
When it comes to tech support call centers, some may actually improve. Not because the technology is so superior, but just because the current support simply sucks, and any change would be an improvement. And then they must actually work, i.e. solve the customers problems. On top of that, there is that case where an AI call center made expensive promises (IIRC if promised a car for $1 or something like that), and the judge made the company uphold this deal.
It’s already in the works. We leverage genrative AI via a chat bot in our internal ticketing system for ticket deflection and we’re currently rolling out a similar feature for external customers as well. This goes well beyond simply linking high level FAQs. The bot asks a series of questions based on the issue and goes through the same line of questions our service desk reps ask to help diagnose and resolve the issue. And if they go through the entire T1 process within a minute or so and don’t have an answer, it creates a ticket for the appropriate team based off of whatever platform, app, or website the issue is in regards to.
It’s crazy scalable and has allowed multiple teams to shift focus towards more project oriented work. Without it we probably would have hired more service desk reps as the company grew
We still get some internal customers that just mindlessly click through it or slack us directly but that’s the joy of IT.
I work for a company that is “all in” on AI. And offshoring. But AI is unlikely to provide second or third level support for complex and poorly documented software that operates at the intersection of legislation and rule making.
Add to that, customers who are licensed in their field but cannot comprehend that software implementation of paper forms requires the same inputs generally, much less explain their objective…
Also, the implementations I’ve been presented with as a consumer have been hot garbage.
The front line folks who exist primarily so customers can yell at someone might be in trouble. But companies who put their people in that position are shit anyway.
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