Call Center Jobs Are Declining, but 14,000 Calls Show Humans Still Outperform AI

toomuchtodo

https://legiscan.com/CA/text/AB1609/id/3460800 - California’s AB 1609 requires large businesses to connect customers with human agents within 15 minutes. - Businesses exceeding $500 million in revenue must display wait times and disclose chatbot interactions. - Violations carry civil penalties starting at $5,000, making human access a legal obligation.

add-sub-mul-div

The AI era isn't about what performs best. It's about what can be delivered most cheaply and isn't a liability because your competition will be doing the same thing.

symfoniq

AI “customer service” is so incredibly bad. I’ve not had a single interaction that an AI agent could solve. It’s just a huge waste of my time and an increase in aggravation.

10xDev

"AI" Usually when I chat with a support bot it doesn't feel like an LLM but something that performs keyword matching and a prewritten response pre-LLM era.

mym1990

I don't know how much more cost effective AI bots are for customer service over offshore call centers currently , but I would guess that the industry sees the AI tooling getting much better over the next X years, while call center agents are going to be relatively level in terms of skill, so companies are investing early on in the technology. To be honest, my favorite customer service experience are ones where I tell a bot the issue, and they just refund me my cost, widely seen on delivery apps and Amazon. This is ripe for moral hazard but I'm sure there is monitoring happening for that as well.

sdthjbvuiiijbb

This is published by Bold Agents, a company that appears to provide a platform for AI customer service agents, and is based on their own data. Doesn't this really just mean that they're saying that their own product kind of sucks? I believe Sierra is the market leader in this space with a few other companies like Salesforce and Decagon also competing. It would be more interesting to see an evaluation of performance by these parties before making sweeping claims about the performance of AI agents as a whole.

TrainedMonkey

Some, maybe most, humans outperform AI. I've had some calls where I would have preferred an AI that could not understand me to an agent whom I could not understand AND who could barely understand me.

ge96

Man that annoys me calling some place and it's that openai voice answering

silverFork

don't worry, they will make Ai listen to the calls with human agents and in about a year, it will out perform them. Have you heard that "this call will be recorded" blah blah.. Now they will use those recordings... Time is on their side.

dmitrygr

Support has costs. Fine. I consider purchases under $500 to not include support, and treat them all as "sold as is" However, if I need support and cannot reach a real living breathing human in under 30 min regarding any purchase over $500, I hang up, call AmEx and file a chargeback, citing inability to gain support. So far they have backed me every time. If enough people do it, chargeback costs send the message.

bluedino

I've used some great AI support agents/bots, whatever they're called. An example of a great one is Lemonade (the insurance company). Most of the others are terrible. I'll pick on Dell for this next one. Their website in general, is terrible. Why would their support agent be any better? We purchased a switch from Dell, that cost more than my SUV. Having a hardware issue with it, can't remember if it was fans or a power supply or what. It needs someone to come out and repair it, and we have the big fancy service plan. There's no way to find the switch on the Dell support website. It's not listed anywhere. https://www.dell.com/support/home/en-us/products/networking_... You can't actually contact support, you have to identify your device, and then you get options from there. https://www.dell.com/support/incidents-online/en-us/contactu... However, this product doesn't have a service tag, or express service code, so you can't do that. So you try to use the 'Virtual Assistant', who has no idea what you're trying to tell it, no matter which way you try. They link to a contact page but you just end up getting looped back around. There is no useful information to be extracted from this dumb thing. I finally found a phone number on the website, and was connected to a woman who sounded like she was smoking cigarettes in a basement somewhere in Alabama. She looked through her notes on the computer, and found out for this particular switch I need to go through the OEM manufacturer. I was relieved to have gotten useful information.

plasticeagle

AI slop article, of course. It can be summed up thus : AI agents answer the phone slightly more often, but they get hung up on 7 times more often than humans. Overall they make customer service and your business work much worse. It is also a bullshit advertorial for a product; In this case, an AI sales agent. There is (almost) no worse idea in human history than an AI agent trying to sell things to people. Their entire website is AI generated, and is so stuffed full of slop that it's impossible to read.

Forgeties79

The problem is it doesn’t matter if they perform better. If AI is just above “too shitty” and costs less, that’s what businesses will generally choose. And that’s the entire problem. “Good enough” reigns supreme for most businesses. In some cases that’s fine, in a lot of others it just tests our patience/tolerance and makes things painful.

gradus_ad

1-800 Contacts has my undying love because their customer support is excellent and seamless. I wouldn't say I look forward to calling them, but it's just so simple and effortless.

redrix

Some of the best uses of AI in call centres that I’ve seen focus on improving human interaction instead of getting rid of it. For example: - Finding information in the background / performing an account health check instead of putting the caller on hold for 20 minutes. - Helping newer consultants find the same offers experienced staff know about amongst 200 pages of active/targeted offers. - Automatically documenting calls so when someone calls back, they don’t get a “sorry, I can’t find any notes about that on your account”. - Giving the offshore call center consultant a customized script based on the active discussion instead of a generic one (Yes, reading from a script is still bad, but at least this makes it somewhat more natural rather than it feeling like you’re talking to a lobotomised employee.)

AaronAPU

Had a recall reimbursement through Stellantis and couldn’t figure out if it was the best AI I’ve ever spoken to or the most professional human I’ve ever spoken to.

teeray

Weird, it’s almost like people hate talking to robots