Alternate title: CEO with no background in computer science and surface level knowledge of AI weighs in on latest industry buzzword and makes wild predictions.
I called this about 10 years ago when working in a call center during college.
I said, “In 10-15 years, this job will not exist. It will be done by AI.”
People disagreed with me. Said, “There are ways I can get a survey complete that you can’t program an AI to do.” And “People don’t want to talk to robots, they want to talk to real people.”
No, no one wants to talk to robots OR real people. They hate us. Also, anything you can do (at a call center job) a properly trained AI can do, and probably better. It was just a matter of time for machine learning and voice generation to get there.
Oh great, now customer service will be a million times worse, and you’ll never ever be able to speak to an actual person to get your unique issue resolved. This fuckin sucks
Not if they have full market dominance. There are tons of industries, shit man, almost every industry, is now dominated by a few behemoth corporations that collude and rule through olegopolism.
The poor quality is a benefit to these shitter corporations.
Oh sure you can get a refund, just go through customer service hell. It’s all about that 1-10% group of people who give up and relent to the corporations infinite hunger for money.
If customer service wasn’t experiencing "unprecedented " call volume, people would be more willing to get their rightful conflict resolution.
That would require these companies to treat customer service staff like human beings so they don’t keep quitting after a month or end up being dead inside. They don’t want to do that so robots it is!
Working in a call center sucks so much ass I’ve worked for more than one they have all tried to prevent me from using the restroom your job is to get yelled at all day in back to back phone calls everything you do is timed tracked and monitored and they do not want you to take one minute off the phones for any reason.
Two of the best call centers I’ve ever worked with would be Google Fiber and Intel. Both of which are probably terrible now.
(2015) Google Fiber actually had people who understood networking, understood my personal setup, and understood what tests I had already performed to diagnose that my issue with their equipment. No faffing about with a script, I gave them my test results and got an appointment for a replacement line in like, 15 minutes, and an immediate credit on the account.
(2009) Back when Intel made rock-solid vanilla motherboards I did a dumb and accidentally disabled legacy USB on my board, which meant that I couldn’t press F2/DEL to get back into BIOS. I called Intel, gave them the troubleshooting steps I already ran (including jumper BIOS reset), and the call center forwarded me to the engineer who designed the motherboard. He whipped up and sent a bootable CD-ROM image to update the BIOS back to default and then updated all future revisions to avoid my issue.
Let’s add some advertisements to this, sou the AI can sell you stuff while not helping you.
I do not know too many people that are happy after a scripted indian callcenter experience. Replacing the people with shitty generative AI will only make it a little bit worse.
I build software that’s used in call centers and have therefore been in several of them, including 2 in India. My team builds things that help with voice and chat.
I can’t stress enough two things: the aim is and probably always will be to deflect away things that people could have Googled themselves. LLMs, if trained on the right stuff and not hallucinating, would genuinely be good on this.
Secondly, CCs and telecoms in general have not escaped the business cultural shift in the last 10 years to the frantic obsession with g r o w t h. So yes, they definitely are trying to sell you something on every call. However this really depends on the human personality involved, and any near-future LLMs would definitely struggle to sell you anything. Some of these people are magical at talking you into buying stuff. Do j mean scamming? No. The easiest thing to sell is the thing you’d probably benefit from, the hurdle being that you didn’t know about it or aren’t in the mood to buy because you called to complain about coverage. For European telecoms at least, there are severe penalties for misselling, too (that’s part of what our software tracks).
So in summary, LLMs might replace the link you’re sent to the FAQs page or the bit where you confirm who you are. But they are at least many years away from replacing the agents who can do what telecoms currently want them to do - turn the call into a sale.
Most of them are not good at selling anything. That’s why they give them a script to follow, which also restrains the good salespeople in a callcenter. If they change the way of their offers - maybe custom generated deals based on available customer data by an AI that management trusts more than people - they might sell better than Pajeet ever did.
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