This is good for society just like any productivity enhancing invention. You'd think a place like HN would know that the only way the world has ever gotten better has been innovation improving per-human output.
in theory: customer support automation frees up support workers from focusing on repetetive customer issues to being able to devote more time to those difficult issues, providing better service at lower cost
in practise: have you ever used any automated customer support for anything? it speaks for itself - it's literally worse than nothing.
We've never had a gpt powered customer support though. It will be fine tuned on all of their recorded customer interactions ever. I could see this being way better than typical customer support where you have minimally trained, low wage employees who barely know how to use a computer just reading a script.
You do understand that your comment is self nullifying right?
If the majority of support people are "minimally trained, low wage employees who barely know how to use a computer just reading a script." then how exactly is the AI going to be better by using the recorded interactions of "low wage employees who barely know how to use a computer just reading a script"
The problem with customer support broadly isn’t having the agent understand you, it’s often about escalation until you get to an agent with the authority to handle your particular exceptional circumstance. There is no godly way any company will ever allow a chatbot, however capable, to go off script.
No, but it could defer to a human if it’s unable to assist. If a chatbot can cover 80% of common support tasks, that vastly reduces the number of support staff but those who remain will be necessarily more skilled and have more authority
Well, the same happens for chat text interfaces, but I have used those much fewer times.
People usually don't call the normal usable UI that solves problems "automated customer support", but if you refer to a navigable web site with real options to solving things, then well, you are offtopic but that one works.
It's not offtopic. Many people in this thread seem to think that any customer service UI that's powered by AI/LLMs has to present a chat/voice interface.
Well, where else do you plan on using the AI? On search? (Yes, it would be an improvement, but search is not very far from chat.)
Automated customer service works exceptionally well if it's done with care and doesn't involve AIs. But we simply do not have any AI design that helps with it. All designs we have only hinder it.
Just to clarify, when you said you used automated customer support to "cancel orders, cancel subscriptions, change a broadband package, arrange a return/refund for faulty goods", you're saying you used UI to do those things?
The goal of communication is to share ideas and reach an understanding, not to be technically correct. No one else was thinking about websites when talking about "support" and I'm guessing you knew that.
the biggest companies in the world (microsoft, google, netflix, amazon, facebook) have pretty awful customer service no imo. What kinds of companies are you talking about?
And here I am thinking that a place like HN can appreciate that Econ 101 axioms don't translate perfectly to the real world.
Moving call centre jobs to India and Philippines 20 years ago didn't exactly make those that lost their jobs more productive over the long run. The textbook says it should have, as American comparative advantage should be in higher value-added activities.
The only problem is that the textbook also thinks re-skilling is free, everyone has alternate options for employment, and the labour market re-balances instantly.
it could be good for humanity IF the societal and economic model for basic survival would evolve in tandem.
If we were moving towards UBI and made employment an optional thing then a world in which machines do most of the human work would be utopic indeed
But reality has evolved differently, and after the need for manual labour and craftsmanship got decimated in the last century, now software is pushing into the fields where all the people needing jobs who aren't needed in production ended up.
If we follow this train of thought, that we'd like to diminish the need for individual labour, without removing the individuals need to work as well, we'll just be enlarging the divide between affluence and utter poverty.
I very much disagree with this idea of productivity being good in and of itself. I don't think that is controversial here. To the contrary, I think your view is controversial.
>You'd think a place like HN would know that the only way the world has ever gotten better has been innovation
Since 2013 this site has not been the optimistic hacker/startup forum Paul Graham envisioned in 2007. For a decade it has just been a higher quality version of r/technology but with the same reddit-tier doomposting.
