Greg Egan

I have no problem at all — in principle — with automating customer help inquiries. But what this *ought* to consist of, mostly, is exposing more information to the customer in a more accessible, searchable and understandable form.

Carefully written software could supercharge / personalise “help pages” and FAQs on a company’s web site, rendering a significant proportion of help desk phone calls unnecessary. Most of the time when I need to call a company, it’s because their web UI simply isn’t offering me some information that is in their system (and which the help desk staff can see), but that they’ve decided I don’t need to know.

Anyway ... that’s how I think these things *should* work. The link is to reporting on multiple cases where, instead, companies decided to pretend than their “AI” could just mimic human customer service staff and take their place, which of course it couldn’t, and it all went horribly wrong.

[H/T @lana ]

https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/southkorea/society/20260316/what-ai-overtaking-jobs-looks-like

What AI overtaking jobs looks like

“Are you actually a human?” The voice of a middle-aged man, thick with anger, roars through the phone. For Lee Eun-young — a pseudonym for a woman...

The Korea Times
Mar 18 at 11:43amWeb
Show threadCM Thiede4d ago
@gregeganSF @lana or even better, the information isn't visible to user or staff, and user gets to make the company better by suggesting a feature request 😂
Show threadSteveg584d ago
@gregeganSF
I take it you are not banking with Bankwest then?
Show threadGreg Egan4d ago
@Steveg58 No I’m not. Why? Are they already doing something wonderful along the lines I suggested?
Show threadSteveg584d ago

@gregeganSF

Sorry not what you wanted to see ... but the very opposite.

Yup! Including a deliberate 55 minute hold for anyone crass enough to actually want to talk to a human.

Show threadSupermoosie4d ago

@Steveg58 @gregeganSF

The reason I am calling is because something has gone wrong.

No the information is not on your website.

No the chatbot can not help me.

I need a human and a human that can listen, understand, knows the workings and can fix it.

Not something that will take notes and get someone to eventually call me back.

A chat bot can not do that. Its purpose is to fob people off, so they don't call and cost money to service.

Yet, not having human service costs you too.

You won't learn to improve. You won't get repeat business, we will tell everyone not to use you.

Show threadSoapDog4d ago

@gregeganSF @lana @rysiek as someone who write that reference material for a living and whose employer attempted to train and offer an AI solution based on my own material, let me candidly say: hell no.

AI not only hallucinate more than people realise, but also misses all the nuance and contextualisation that exists beyond their training data but that is part of the lived experience of those producing and using such content.

Slop is very sloppy.

Show threadGreg Egan4d ago

@soapdog @lana @rysiek

I’m not sure if your “hell no” was directed at me, or at the nightmare Korean chatbot experience, but my own suggestion was *not* for generative AI to be involved at all, but rather for software to be used to make (largely human written) FAQ/help pages easier to access, search and use. This would not be intended to replace human conversations, when necessary, but it would have the potential to address some problems where customers can’t solve some straightforward issues purely because the static FAQs on the company web site are too limited, or it’s too hard to find the relevant information.

Show threadSoapDog4d ago

@gregeganSF @lana @rysiek

the "hell no" was not for you, it was mostly about people putting gen AI into help and faq pages.

I got your point and agree, making information more accessible is always good.