this post was submitted on 07 Oct 2023
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The article only slightly touched on this, but the incoming LLM customer service chatbots are going to absolutely fucking suck, just like outsourcing all the call centers made customer service actually a lot worse, not because people farther away are worse at customer service or anything, but because companies created rigid systems and scripts to remove any agency from its agents. It's now common for these outsourced call centers to have an initial layer of absolutely useless positions who are only allowed to do a few things, and then they have to escalate to a "supervisor," who is clearly just an agent with slightly more privileges, and this continues recursively forever. All this does is make the call last forever, but hey, they save some money, and customers like you and me are forced to spend an hour plus on the phone any time we have a problem with any large company.
Capitalist job replacement isn't a one-for-one. So long as it makes more profits to do it, they will, even if it makes the service suck. When I have a problem, I need a person with some understanding and agency to resolve it on the other end. LLMs don't know anything. Even a semi-fluent person with no admin privileges is so much more useful than an LLM. These companies are going to fire all these workers and make customer service an absolute fucking nightmare.
tl;dr capitalism uses computers backwards
https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/16luf4o/an_ai_phone_call_api_powered_by_chatgpts_api_this/
Sorry, don't have a different link for the video. But if that's a real demo...
Even if that's a real demo, I still have two thoughts.
First, the technical capacity of it has nothing to do with our user experience. Indian people are just as good at delivering customer service as Americans are, yet when we outsource customer service, we make it worse.
Second, even in that demo, the chat bot didn't do anything. I very rarely call customer service for technical support. When I call, I normally need specific answers to me, or actions from the company, like a flight change, or an explanation for a charge I don't understand, or to coordinate warrantied repairs on something I just bought, etc. Notice that all the information the chatbot gave was general-purpose, googlable stuff. Companies aren't going to let their chatbots change your flight for you or whatever. What's going to happen is we're going to have to deal with an LLM that can't actually resolve our problems, and convince it to go fetch a human.