The rare sort of Engineer who took classes in Finance and Statistical Analytics who can work out a past-present-future cash flow diagram on a whiteboard in like 5min because he never uses the compound interest factor tables and instead memorized the formulas.
Idk— Tesla directed autopilot to disengage the moment before a crash, to ensure that the driver was held responsible. I sadly doubt any corpo would pay for its mistake
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.
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