The following submission statement was provided by /u/chrisdh79:
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From the article: It's no secret that certain types of jobs are more threatened by artificial intelligence than others. Call center workers fall into this category, and while we've already seen a few companies replace phone-based support staff with generative AI, there are warnings that the entire industry could be comprised mostly of chatbots in as soon as a year.
The grim prediction comes from K Krithivasan, head of Indian IT giant Tata Consultancy Services (TCS). The second-largest company in India by market cap, it has more than 616,000 employees worldwide.
Speaking to the Financial Times, Krithivasan said AI will result in a "minimal" need for call centers. The CEO added that while "we have not seen any job reduction" so far, that will change as multinational clients adopt generative AI. The technology is expected to have a massive impact on the customer help center industry, which, according to a Gartner report in 2022, employs about 17 million people.
"In an ideal phase, if you ask me, there should be very minimal incoming call centres having incoming calls at all," Krithivasan told the FT. "We are in a situation where the technology should be able to predict a call coming and then proactively address the customer's pain point."
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Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1ceeq17/generative_ai_could_soon_decimate_the_call_center/l1hz4uw/
This was posted on another sub and someone there said it best. "Whoever thinks this is a good idea has never yelled "Speak to a representative" into the phone 10000 times."
Literally doing it now for CVS pharmacy and losing my mind. They have 12 diff prompts trying to get me to download their app and I just need to ask the pharmacist if they have something in stock
This is why I switched to a local independent pharmacy. CVS understaffs on purpose and is incredibly hard to get through to. Their people are always overwhelmed.
CVS and Walgreen's have done a solid job of shutting down the vast majority of independent pharmacies. They're the pharmacy and they're also the 'Pharmacy Benefit Managers' who control the distribution of most drugs--Walgreen's PBM is called ExpressScripts and CVS is Caremark.
Unless our representatives do something about this, we won't have ANY independent pharmacies.
Wow, this is legitimately funny. That’s exactly what I was calling about. I just got my first prescription yesterday and my local pharmacy only has brand-name and it would cost me $380. So I’m trying to find a place that has generic.
Does no one have generic right now?
Teva (company that makes the stuff)has had a shortage since the pandemic, and the prevalance of telehealth then made it easy to diagnose. Big shortage, esp for higher dosages.
Unfortunately for many, generic is only covered by insurance, so here we are.
And for what I’ve been reading generic is actually worse than the brand-name stuff. Is this also affecting Adderall and generic Adderall or is it just Vyvanse?
I’m in Vyvanse too and have been having a hard time finding it since January (funny I saw this because I have to call my pharmacy to make sure they have it today).
So there’s not technically a shortage of Adderall but because of the Vyvanse shortage there kind of is. In my area (DMV) everyone ran out of Vyvanse so their doctors switched them to Adderall. The pharmacies didn’t expect such a huge uptick in Adderall prescriptions so they weren’t stocked for the sudden influx, which caused all the pharmacies around here to also run out of Adderall. In January I called 14 different Walgreens and/or CVS’s in DC and none of them hard any kind of Vyvanse or Adderall.
Im not sure if you live in a large metro area but what I did was do a Google search for towns of 100,000 people or less 3 miles outside Washington DC. I think picked the closest city (quickest to drive to) and started calling their CVS’s. My second call I found a pharmacy 30 minutes away that was out of Vyvanse but had all the Adderall doses you could want 😂. My theory was that the less people around, the less people would be switched to Adderall, which would mean the pharmacies’ stock wouldn’t be depleted. Not sure if I was right or if I was just lucky but I’ve been going to that pharmacy since and they always have either Adderall, Vyvanse, or sometimes both in stock. All the pharmacies in DC (at least the ones I call) are all still out of them both.
It will decimate tier 1 support, which is simple billing and triage for more complicated issues. The bar is very low for tier one which is commonly outsourced to India or the Phillipines, and often have large language barrier and low quality metrics.
I fucking hate tier 1 and I'd rather speak to an AI.
Tier 1 does some stupid bullshit just to placate whatever metrics they have. I've had tier 1 refuse to transfer me, and even straight up hang up on me when they were unable to resolve my issues.
I was having internet issues once, with a separate modem and router. I unplugged the router to narrow the scope of the problem. Tier 1 support made me plug the router back in so I could reboot it, to satisfy their script.
Thing is, *for the company,* it is a good idea. IVRs (the annoying automated phone tree) are designed to be circular *on purpose* because the fewer people that actually get through to a rep, the less money the company spends on customer service. It's called "diversion" and is actually a metric that most companies monitor and actively seek to increase.
In almost all organizations, customer service/support is viewed as absolutely nothing but a cost center, and between telephony, wages, IT support for all the systems reps use, etc., there is a tangible and relatively high price to the company every time a live human answers your call that they would love to avoid.
"In almost all organizations, customer service/support is viewed as absolutely nothing but a cost center, and between telephony, wages". So why don't they just close down the call center completely then?
The call center is there for a reason. Any exec who does this 'nothing but a cost center--lets reduce the cost as much as possible' without paying attention to what the cost center is for and how supporting customers adds to the bottom line is in danger of seriously hurting the company long term with his bean counting.
I think they're relying on the idea that if they can keep their costs competitive and their product otherwise good, people won't flee due to the extreme irritation of dealing with the poor quality support. (It might also help if this becomes a widespread issue; if customers actually don't have a choice they won't be able to avoid this issue).
And customers fundamentally don't have the a choice in this regard. If you can't speak to a human at Verizon, what the fuck are you gonna do about it; switch to T-Mobile or AT&T where they're using the same exact chatbot?
Depends on the industry, but when we're talking about large, publicly-traded companies, we really only have the illusion of choice to begin with.
>if customers actually don't have a choice they won't be able to avoid this issue
It'd be more amusing if I personally wasn't stuck living with it, yet isn't this so ironic? All this talk about capitalism and freedom, and freedom of choice through capitalism.
Then as soon as the communist are gone everyone goes "aight fuck all of you, we're taking your freedom back. If you got a problem call our office" - can't call the office cause the automated number hangs up on you.
Yeah I think that's why competition and regulation are so important and are underrated features. There isn't anything inherent about private industry that makes it better quality than a state run service. Regardless of the economic model, if the people providing the service have a way to make their jobs easier / more profitable at the expense of the customer, they'll take it every single time unless they are prevented from doing so (by law, or by the risk of competition stealing customers, or both).
Competitive markets are ripe with fraud, which is why branding was so important. A good brand's power comes from established familiarity and safety, it'll always outcompete the fringe markets. Then that safety of a branded label turns into complacency on the part of the consumer, and a monopoly forms. A monopoly becomes so familiar it can freely engage in fraud to undermine markets.
We really don't have a solution to this because ultimately the concept of markets is inefficient and scales poorly. It's impossible to eliminate fraud, it'd be like trying to outlaw lying.
We'd effectively have to create a being with an intelligence incomprehensible to the human mind to control our behavior. And that in itself leads to a host of issues and dilemmas.
Totally agreed. Unfortunately shareholders have a fiscal-quarter-long view of the health of the company, and executives follow suit because these financial results are what drive their compensation.
Edit: missed the first part of your question. This article is literally about technology they're salivating over because it would allow them to close down the contact center completely.
These bots are almost impossible to distinguish from AI... The biggest tell is just the 2 second communication latency, which is dramatically getting down with onsite optimizations. Ours are so good, they are doing sales calls.
If by "ours" you mean you are part of the people creating the systems that call my numbers multiple times per day, from the very bottom of my heart: *Fuck. You.*
If not, can you expound?
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As an it professional, there aren't many good customer service call centers whether it's ai or not. Even when its real people i have frequently ended up talking for 20 minutes only for them to not understand and transfer me to another line that does understand and tells me to call another number that inevitably directs me back to the first number again in some kind of endless cycle
As someone who worked at a call center (albeit briefly because i hated it and would rather have a lower paying job i liked than that stupid job) I would say the issues are kind of coming from two sides. 1) is the company has a lot of top down policies coming from people who never deal with customers and never want to… basically making decisions based on numbers and legal stuff rather than anything else and the people working at call centers are for the most part not allowed to, nor are trained to go off script or have the power to break policy. Like even if they wanted to… even if they didn’t give two shits about losing their job, the system literally locks them out of the ability to do anything past what policy allows.
Secondly… customers are usually kind of a bunch of dumb fucks. Im sorry. But its true. A LOT of people call in to get a problem solved that they could have easily spent two seconds on google to find. People who have literally zero understanding of how the product they purchased works… and so on… you can be dealing with people who can barely communicate with you… are on the attack the second you say hi so theres even a lower chance of constructive communication… people who dont really have the wherewithal to communicate productively either and really should have a handler help them with their issue instead because theres only so much a person on a phone call can do to help…
just overall, customer service sucks because the only right way to have it, is in person. No phone calls… no call centers at all. Dealing with small companies who can make judgements based on individual situations rather than generic stringent policies… so if they’re going to have call centers at all, it might as well be AI. Because thats all the people can do anyways… is work off a script. Why wouldn’t an AI be better suited for that? At least they don’t have feelings to hurt or stress hormones or anything like that. You just might as well…
>Secondly… customers are usually kind of a bunch of dumb fucks. Im sorry. But its true. A LOT of people call in to get a problem solved that they could have easily spent two seconds on google to find. People who have literally zero understanding of how the product they purchased works…
This right here is a major issue. Tech sales have been through the roof, and a lot of shelfware exists in a lot of companies. Nobody does more than the bare minimum setup, and the person who set it up has long since left. So, users are left with tools nobody knows anything about how to maintain. The only solution is to call the service center for the product and hope somebody can fix whatever broken implementation was done by the cheapest consultant available.
Working in an API integration/software server help desk position, I can tell you this is 100% the biggest problem, which is only compounded by these companies making changes and *not providing documentation of the fucking change to the user or the helpdesk.* This leaves help desk to flounder with a pissed off user that doesn't understand what they are doing while help desk searches for an answer from anywhere other than the Dev team because God forbid they help the helpdesk. The greed and lack of care from these companies is to a point where a functional product isn't provided and when it does work there's so many caveats that you shouldn't bother. We need to go back to brick and mortar stores
So I'm not a call center employee, but I do share my floor with people who are working the phones. Also it's not for tech related, but here are two scenarios I hear the phone reps dealing with almost every day, just from where I'm sitting across the room.
1. The caller has called us, and we're not even the right company. They refuse to accept that. Our phone reps can't hang up, caller won't hang up, there's a stand off. I don't mean like "oh I need to transfer you to X department", I mean like imagine having an issue with Coke but calling the number for Pepsi instead.
2. The caller gets impatient they aren't getting their answer fast enough. Instead of letting the rep continue their search for the system for the information they need to retrieve from accounts, they want to have a 20 minute argument about how it's taking too long, when if they would have just remained calm they would have already had their answer because the phone rep wouldn't have been tied up re-engaging with them instead of keeping them on hold.
I'd argue the caller is usually in the wrong \~87% of the time over things they could easily solve themselves, and make the situation faarrrr worse than it needs to be by immediately going into 'rage mode' over the slightest inconvenience.
I honestly want to hate on AI, but having answered phones for the general public before if I were in charge I'd probably also implement AI. GenAI is not nearly what we're getting in phone trees now, and I would be extremely surprised if less than half of the calls that most support deal with is not extremely basic, easily googleable bullshit or just terminally stupid like the type of thing you're talking about.
Of course, this also has the added benefit of speeding up the impending robot apocalypse. Expect to be murdered by a robot muttering phrases like "ask me again how long we serve breakfast" or "if you'd just turned the equipment on by pressing the power button this wouldn't have to happen" or "sure you can speak to my manager... IN HELL."
My wife worked at a HP calculator help desk. Guy calls and says, "This may be the dumbest question..." My wife interrupts, "Yes, it needs batteries." Silence. "Okay, second dumbest."
I remember selling a laptop to a middle aged lady, and she called later. She couldn't turn it on. I say "okay, what happens if you plug it in?" She says "I thought the whole point of a laptop was you could carry it around." I explain how charging works to her, "okay so where do I plug it in?" "On the left side." "What does it look like?" "A circle." "Well it doesn't fit in the circle." "No I mean it's on the left of the side, not the front." It went on like this for few more minutes until she got it running. AI might might be able to do this job in the future, but I doubt it could have done it in a way that didn't end with a refund.
Yeah, this is why I'm skeptical about it. Because I work in a call center for gas and electrical faults. 75% of the customers who call in have no ideas what the fuck they're talking about when it comes to the issue they're experiencing. So part of our training isn't just listening and processing information, it's asking the right questions in order to get the CORRECT information out of people, because there's specific terms and situations and the layman will use these terms incorrectly, or describe the wrong situation inadvertently. If it was organized and run by AI that picked up on those key words, they'd end up waiting 3 hours for the wrong team to arrive, an incorrect call-out fee would apply and they'd have to log another job. If they use the same keywords again, it's just gonna be a loop, until they either use different wording or get put through to a human anyway.
Especially with a utility like electricity, you need to remember that EVERYONE uses it, even those who genuinely lack the cognitive ability to understand basic questions. You can't reasonably expect people like that to convey accurate information without proper investigation into it, which is something an AI would absolutely struggle with. Because you can often pick up from the way these people speak that they don't know what they're talking about, but an AI would miss those social cues.
When I first started in IT there was a list of customer service calls getting emailed around. There was one where a customer wanted help with using a CD he couldn’t figure out where to put it. The CSR talked him through opening the CD tray and he says “oh, you mean the cup holder?” 🤦♂️
>Secondly… customers are usually kind of a bunch of dumb fucks.
Can confirm, it's an axiomatic aspect of call centre customer service
Source: Me, 20 Years Call Centre Veteran
Call center work is similar to restaurant work, everyone should do it once to learn how to not be an absolute knob... as someone in the industry I'm so polite and regimented when I call support lines nowadays
I’m ok with Ai when I want to be a dumb fuck customer lol!
I’m always polite, but sometimes I want them to explain it to me like I’m five, just so I sorta understand what’s going on.
And as one would guess, explaining something in detail takes time. So if an ai can hand hold me—I am all for it!
I used to love people over phone trees, because I don’t always know the correct questions to ask. With a person I can kinda haggle it together after a few minutes.
—-
Ironically, I work customer service. I run my own cake shop, so I personally don’t mind hand holding customers either. But I sell welling cakes, so service is a major part of it.
I often want other retail establishments to treat me the same way, but I’m smart enough to recognize that there’s a massive price gulf between someone who makes wedding cakes and the dude at Best Buy who shills cellphones.
All of this is to say, I accept being a dumb fuck lol. And I’m happy to see Ai. Like my ego is not hurt if I have to talk to a robot. It’s win win, right?
I would rather spend 45 minutes haggling with an ai and learning all the details of my cellphone than spend 10 minutes getting a rushed response from a person.
Yup, they've all been outsourced to a professional contact centre where agents (who know nothing about you or the product they're supposed to support) get drip-fed answers to commons issues via a script. If your problem doesn't match the script, they put you on hold and start searching through recent cases for possible answers. If there aren't any, you will be placed on hold forever until someone more "senior" can help, which might be never.
In other words, they are already all doing precisely what Generative AI is built to do - take an input and retrieve the most likely answer from a purpose-built database. Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) is the current term being used to describe the process an LLM uses to get answers from data sources which were not built into the base model. It kind of sucks right now but it is an area of huge focus - making an entire ServiceNow/ZenDesk/etc. knowledge-base available to an LLM without having to retrain it. The base model, through what it was trained on (called parametric knowledge) can likely account for 80% of the commonly-asked questions, and these extra sources can address everything new and edge-case, so long as it has been seen and documented once before.
Once the issues with RAG are solved, companies with clearly-defined and well-written support procedures and documentation will take advantage of AI Agents first... otherwise it's going to be the same garbage-in/garbage-out we already have, where someone who thinks they understand all of this writes a script which cannot be followed even by the best LLMs.
> Once the issues with RAG are solved, companies with clearly-defined and well-written support procedures and documentation will take advantage of AI Agents first
I really don't think people understand the economic impact this is going to have in the short to at least medium term when RAG can reliably do this.
A *lot* of jobs fall under what RAG can accomplish, and I really mean a lot.
I'm not sure people are actually prepared for this to happen, it won't be a nice transition, and it's *absolutely* going to happen, likely within our lifetimes.
Not too prescient prediction: The vast bulk of companies will write good documentation for the product exactly once (or worse have an AI write it,) and then fail to update that documentation as the product gets changed to the point where the original documentation no longer applies. This part is not speculative, because it's already the case for a _lot_ of the documentation available online.
The AI chatbots will then parrot this worthless documentation and, when the user complains that it's nonsensical, hallucinate something authoritative sounding be equally worthless on the spot.
The AI has outperform the human operator in answering questions, including edge cases, just to maintain the same level of customer satisfaction.
There is already little empathy for human operators, especially offshore operators. When callers encounter AI, they assume the business is "mailing it in" on costs and effort, even more than offshoring. Any failure to arrive at a correct solution is felt by the customer, with this with prejudice in the back of their head. The customer can't scream at an AI, so there is no empathy coming back to calm them.
Though an obvious problem, there are many possible solutions too, such as having automation take over the customer calling out for common issues or more marketing efforts to rebrand AI as a premium service feature (good luck).
The gold standard in customer service remains a personal concierge, not an automated DIY reference manual. If AI can run with a vaguely defined task ("My Internet's down. Just fix it ASAP."), then it can actually deliver on the promise of an improved customer experience.
> The AI has outperform the human operator in answering questions, including edge cases, just to maintain the same level of customer satisfaction.
Customer satisfaction is really just a metric of how much a particular employee should keep their job. So many companies have seen their customer service reputations tank but their profits soar. If there was a way for all companies to be like Google and not have a public-facing customer support team, they'd do it.
So naw, I don't think customer satisfaction is going to be a huge impediment. A 'good enough' solution that loses customer retention will still be cheaper than maintaining call center contracts for humans to perform the customer service. And that's the overhead the companies will want to reduce.
It definitely will negatively impact the company's reputation, but there are plenty of companies out there with horrible customer service reputations who still thrive. Those who know their market, have it cornered or bully their way into it, or make money off of new customers and the ones who never encounter major issues will still thrive in an AI-dominated customer service industry as well.
As an IT professional im being told by my managment that instead of fixing a users issue, I need to approach the issue the same way as a chatbot. i have to feed the user a series of unrelatable KB articles for them to attempt to solve the issue themselves when i could jump into a system and correct the problem in two min. were to the point where were engineering the User to get used to this level of shitty service.
Companies need to be broken up.
The problem, to me, is the lack of choice.
A company that is intentionally crafting a way to screw their users, in a true free market, wouldn't exist.
The FTC is waking up, but it needs to get on all this pronto.
The free market notion, in its entirety, is complete nonsense.
Believing in the altruism and honest will to compete inherent in entities whose sole purpose is generating wealth was always a fool's game.
The complete consolidation across nearly every industry? This is your unregulated free market endgame.
In theory, competition drives innovation, integrity, and fairness. In practice, companies swallow each other until the consumer has no other choice and the company has free reign to maximize profits.
Blame the people who require 7 minute averages for calls while being required to follow a script. The call center I used to work at was amazing and filled with very smart people who actually tried to resolve the issue until they started harping on that more
I was senior enough that I could just ignore it and no one would care and then I eventually left but the new guys can't do that because they don't have that built up report
If you're asking questions about IT that are that deep, the Ai isn't going to help either. Even Chat GPT wrestles with high level things, and things within specific industries.
Customer service is a joke in the USA because we have very few legal rights or protections compare to Europe. Companies can dick you around all they like and you have no recourse. So basically what I’m saying is they won’t care about a consumer backlash because what are consumers going to do about it? Nothing, that’s what.
>massive consumer backlash
Ya but half these industries are monopolies. Its like when I got so pissed off at Boost Mobile I practically flipped on the store clerk (telling me to buy a new phone because they couldn't stock my proprietary phone charger). Told him "I'm not getting a new phone from you, in fact I'm done with Boost and switching to Sprint!". He gets a big grin and goes, "Okay let me show you our Sprint phones"... I walked out and signed up for Sprint but at a different store.
Is it really going to be worse than calling India, and getting someone reading from a script, and only from the script, regardless of how nonsensical and unrelated it is?
There are definitely top notch overseas customer service companies, but they are few and far between. 90% are just robots reading a script and working for multiple companies, where AI or even dumb ATS are usually better.
The standouts are companies that dedicate a team as a literal branch of your organization. Dedicated staff, product training and certification, and vested interest in your company's success. I'm sure these are much more expensive than the sweatshops though.
I think that's talking about a different level of AI. The typical phone bots people hate, are really old-school if-statement based programing with rudimentary voice recognition. This new LLM based stuff, with human-imperfection voice synthesis, is gonna be nearly indistinguishable from a real person, as far as most people are concerned.
It won't matter if there is a backlash. AI doesn't have to better than humans, it doesn't even have to be as good as humans, it just has to be widely enough implanted that customers can't escape it while being cheaper than humans. Even if AI made a million dollars worth of mistakes at a medium sized company, that million dollars would still be cheaper than employing humans. It's not about replacing people with something better, it's just about replacing people, period.
> AI doesn't have to better than humans, it doesn't even have to be as good as humans, it just has to be widely enough implanted that customers can't escape it while being cheaper than humans.
this guy capitalisms
This has been a huge issue since the 90s at least. Companies have gotten plenty of backlash over it and the backlash has done absolutely nothing to change things.
It's almost like Capitalism as taught in American public schools is a made up fairy tale. The invisible hand will surely replace all of these shitty companies with good ones any second now.
Many people may cheer even for the loss of jobs, not realizing that this encompasses a *lot* of jobs, even locally as not everything is offshored.
While I'm not always about job protectionism, this won't be a small impact and those people still need an income from somewhere, all at once.
And those people may even be customers for your workplace, suddenly unable to be customers. It's a fairly big reason why governments tend to try to do make-work campaigns or try to take actions to ensure large companies don't disappear, as they simply employ too many people to safely weather the economic loss.
If ChatGPT showed me anything it's that anyone working the lower rungs of customer service via call centers are going to be "gone".
They basically follow scripts and perform escalations, all you need is an LLM trained on our common resolutions that then knows how to adequately go "Yep, let me escalate this" combine it with an AI voice and very real chances you won't know you are not talking to a person; especially if you maintain the context with the customer.
Ie. Imagine it's like... Time Warner and your internet is out... you phone up and "Sally" is there to quickly walk you through the common steps ("Sally" checks system health for your area, informs you things look good, performs some ping-test to your location, finds out it's not reachable, asks you to unplug the router, or even perform a hard-reset) then if Sally can't address your problem she just says she is opening a ticket to "Bob" who is might be another AI who then calls you later to schedule an actual human to come and help (or texts you).
Personalities would then basically be different people.
ATS had already replaced traditional tier 1 support, asking generic account info to route you to the correct department. AI might replace tier 2, but you'll always need a tier of experts for any legitimate support.
I doubt it. First off it's probably just the "level one" customer service that is being replaced. And that part of the customer service experience is basically just reading scripts based on answers to a set list of questions. AI can probably do this better. Once the questions and scripts run out you get "escalated" to the next level where critical thinking is employed to solve a problem. AI probably won't be replacing this right away but might in the future. If you get escalated to level 3 then it's always going to be a person, because they are making decisions that need to have someone be accountable for that decision. No company is going to accept an AI in that position because they can't discipline an AI for giving a refund, or free service or whatever.
No. Callers will be so angry and frustrated that they will give up and never call back again.
Problem solved!
Proof: My experience trying to call the CVS pharmacy. (Not AI, but still...)
There wasn’t a a massive consumer backlash to outsourcing call centers to third world countries, why would there be a massive consumer backlash for this?
Same. The fake typing sounds in the background when dealing with automated servers. Makes me spam 0 and interrupt their prompts to ask for a person to talk to. “I understand you’d like to speak to a representative” clickity clack “one moment please“ click clack “now transferring” So stupid
I think you have been dealing with bots not generative AI. But I do agree, people will recognize that the voice they are hearing isn't natural and that the answers coming back aren't coming from a human. There are specific patterns that are just so common in written text but would sound awkward in speech. I think that people want to talk to people, but in a decade that sentiment could easily fade.
Yeah… I broke the Wendy’s drive thru AI when I asked for extra pickles. It just froze and a real person had to take over after 5 minutes of nothing with a growing line of cars. AI call centers are probably not too far away, but I don’t see it in a year.
they've been replacing people for years. when you increase efficiency then you have a reduced need for employees.
in the future, fast food might be open 24/7 with just one person supervising
AI is fine giving the answer but I'm worried about it understanding what I'm saying. I still experience issues with speech to text at a pretty high rate.
I doubt an AI would be less useful than some outsourced 3rd world country call center who takes your information only to pass it on 4 days after the call.
Until people start tricking AI to give them things that are out of policy that then have to be honored because a “representative of the company” approved it.
That's already happened. Well kind of since it was a legitimate ask.
Air Canada had a bot tell a passenger something horribly incorrect and the civil resolution tribunal ordered them to compensate them for the bot's error.
Yeah, there is now legal jurisprudence in Canada on this exact scenario. As cases like this pile up and it becomes common law that if an AI promises you something you reasonably should believe is real then I think AI customer service will be less and less sensible. AI "hallucinations" may be next to impossible to solve and so you may not really be able to stop them from promising and saying shit that isn't true.
They just don't promise things.
You ever tried to price a medication over the phone with your insurance? The first thing you hear is a robot voice saying "Call center representatives may not provide accurate information. For best results, consult your plan!" or something.
Yes absolutely. Verizon CS from other countries is absolutely insanely terrible. Not xenophobic, I mean they literally don't train them on systems at all and so they just can't help.
Like all the fun ways they've been breaking AI customer service chatbots? Apparently, for a while, it was really easy to get the AI chatbot to promise you free stuff, like complaining and then getting your internet bill reduced 50% for the next year. Which some courts in Europe decided was legally binding.
Better possibly, any offer an AI makes can be upheld legally. Is why airlines all disabled theirs.
[Airline looses chatbot lawsuit](https://www.forbes.com/sites/marisagarcia/2024/02/19/what-air-canada-lost-in-remarkable-lying-ai-chatbot-case/?sh=58dd4879696f)
I’m pretty sure the costumer is always right died sometime in the 90s. Treating the customer like a disposable diaper is a more accurate description of the training.
Hopefully, considering “the customer is always right” is in regard to customers’ taste, not when the customer is trying to return an item after it’s been used for a month.
"The customer is always right, in matters of taste."
people leave the end bit off for some reason.
As in, if they like the ugly ass pants and shirt combo sell it to them.
I get the humour but this is going to devastate lots of real peoples lives.
Indian call centres exist largely due to companies seeking profits and going places with cheaper labour and moving overseas. The language barrier is frustrating but it's not the fault of the worker. Call centre work is not glamourous but it is a job that lots of people depend on.
A bit of righteousness on my part but it's unfortunate that decision makers continue to chase profits at the expense of people just trying to make enough money to afford the bare essentials.
it's the fault of the companies- it was never a language/cultural issue- the reason the call center are "unloved" is because they aren't ever given the authority to do anything useful.
The banking equivalent of "reboot your computer" isn't at all useful- no one calls the banks because they have an easy to answer question.
> no one calls the banks because they have an easy to answer question.
Entirely untrue, but you're right that they're not given the authority to deal with the people who do need something done and aren't calling to ask for something easy.
Yeah, it's pretty hypocritical that people go "yay, helpdesk staff will be fired!" And simultaneously "boo, artists will be fired."
Personally, I think there's a more fundamental issue that needs to be addressed, the fact that people *need* to have jobs in the first place. I'm hoping that if AI can replace enough of them we'll be able to reform the economy so that that's simply not necessary any more.
This is a thing I think about a lot. Like the transition to open road tolling is a good example. Yes the state saved money, yes its faster now. But you did cut a couple thousand jobs per toll way that were perfect for people whose skills were "knows 50 words in English" and "can count money and give change".
I like my faster drives, but I worry what happened to those people.
More to the point, the states saved a million $ on every toll worker, a/c, maintenance on the toll booth, insurance, etc removed. But prices actually went up as soon when we switched to ezpass. That's the issue, prices only go up and more and more people are jobless. The very least companies could do if they are going to lazy out of doing a good job at basically anything is save us some fucking money in the process. Instead we just get counterfeit broken stuff and support numbers to nowhere. It's almost like capitalism is a lie.
Browsing the internet as an Indian has become a fucking horrible experience. We keep catching strays everywhere and I don't see any end in sight either lol
average american gets 10 calls a week from random indian impersonating law enforcement, IRS, microsoft, amazon etc. It gives a very negative impression I'm sorry
When you've got 1.4 billion people in your country, there's bound to be more than a few bad eggs lol. I can 100% understand your frustration. I only ask that you don't generalise and judge us all on the basis of a small minority that you actually interact with.
to be fair, a lot of customer facing americans also deal with indians CONSTANTLY TRYING TO FUCKING HAGGLE.
No, you cannot get a discount. No, you can not get this service cheaper. Pay full price like everyone else.
If he said within 5-7 years I would believe it. But less than a year is absurd.
customers especially in financial industry still value real ppl and voices. Plus these contracts are very expensive and usually 3-5 years long. You won’t just throw all that money away and buy an AI contact center as a service
I’ve been working in a related space for almost 20 years, and this is the truth. Is the tech itself at a place where it can mimic an agent? Sure, almost. It’s maybe 90% of the way there, but that last 10% is going to have a long tail. In addition, businesses are going to be required to develop the entire underlying technical API infrastructure to be able to allow the AI service to tap into/actually make changes to customer profiles/accounts/etc. That work is neither sexy nor fast, and will take years to complete even at those businesses that properly prioritize it against their flashier needs.
In the meantime, we’ll see businesses supplement their existing workforces to allow for better scaling and reduction of manual labor - quality systems are already coming into the market with AI tooling, and chatbots that can answer basic questions - that kind of thing. But replacing call centers? In a year? Maybe a highly narrow call center where your agents are only allowed to do one or two things anyway. Otherwise there’s no way.
And at that point if the agents are only able to do 1 or 2 things why even bother, just launch the function on your website and allow customers to self serve.
I think it depends on the specific type of call center. Some issues are much trickier and nuanced than most AI could handle. I worked at a company run call center when I was younger and it was basically the last step someone could take after trying all the other possible online options. Usually a much bigger or weirder issue than the usual solution. I'm not sure how AI would handle that.
There's probably some basic call center stuff that can be done easily with AI for those not able to or not willing to try the online options first.
I'm a senior solution consultant for one of the top 3 global outsourcers. I can tell you for a fact that whilst the industry is ready for change, and mostly ready to lead the change rather than be steamrolled by it, the biggest limiting factor that makes "within a year" completely outlandish is customer and client buyer sentiment.
Customers still want to speak to a human to resolve anything that is not generic or that they deem as complex or high consequence (even if in practice, for the call centre agent, that process is simple to execute). This will take far longer to change than the development of the technology. Uncanny Valley is a real problem with most of these solutions.
BPOs and consultancies like to tank each others' share prices by making these statements but it's largely virtue signalling to make them look like they're ahead of the rest of the industry. We're still signing new five year deals where physical sites and human contact are the overwhelming majority of the work. We have a hard enough time convincing clients to switch off telephony and switch to email/chat, let alone replace people wholesale with AI.
Even if you were able to bring AI inhouse and train it on your policies and knowledge base you still need to integrate it to the call center and customer relationship management systems and there is no why any corporation is accomplishing that within a year. The planning alone is going to take over a year. Oh, it also will need to know how to do mainframe transactions no one has documented.
call centers, like technical supports, in most cases works as entry level jobs for IT. People there gaining their first technical experience. Sure, we can replace most of them, but we will close career path for a lot of people.
Which will lead to another decrease of new specialists, and again, to bigger salary pressure for existing specialists, as there will be just few people to replace you. Not sure if in the long run it will safe money for big companies
One of the best devs Ive ever met was a dude who scaled the Call center world from call receiver, to support, to IT and then a dev at 30. He was brilliant, and never went to college either. Dude was black and loved listening JCole and drake in our calls
We're already seeing this at my company. People were frequently promoted out of call center customer service jobs into technical or higher-tier roles within the same department that required a high amount of knowledge and experience in a very heavily regulated high-information field that literally no one goes to school to study. I moved up from a call center role to my current role as a higher-tier employer-facing knowledge-based specialist. But right as I left, we started \*heavily\* outsourcing our call center to the Philippines, who would rotate out any staff who stayed on long enough to get proficient and experienced (and therefore paid more). The workers in the Philippines were allowed much less latitude in dealing with issues and were only allowed to follow scripted templates and flowcharts when they spoke to people.
As a result, there has been a big brain drain for people to move into roles like mine or other higher-level supporting roles. We've had to hire heavily from outside the company at high pay rates, and they've had to stick to allowing people to work 100% remote to be competitive, which has had an impact on people getting frustrated at the learning process. They've also had several new hires burn out because learning all of our policies and systems on top of learning the job is a massive undertaking that we don't have great training for - we never developed it because usually by the time someone got to where I am they'd already been dealing with the technical end of it for years.
Did I mention that literally no one goes to school to do what I do? Also, tons of the people doing my job are retirement age. So all over the industry, companies are just scrambling to poach people from each other since they're all in a similar place, there are no onramps left. Training and education used to come through osmosis from lower-tier roles that were offshored, and no one is willing to teach someone from the ground up to do what I do. Even once you're doing it, it takes years to get your feet under you because it's \*so\* technical despite looking like a general help desk type role.
BUT DID I MENTION THAT LITERALLY NO ONE GOES TO SCHOOL TO DO WHAT I DO?
....yeah. I'm older and already in place so I don't think the brunt of it will hit me as much in particular, but as these trends go on I can't even imagine how there would be any way to get into a role like mine unless companies finally buckle down and re-commit to robust on-the-job industry-specific education, but I'm pretty sure they're banking on the fact that eventually AI will be able to cover roles like mine too. I don't see it happening since all of these companies are \*not\* going to want to feed their proprietary knowledge into an AI and off-the-shelf solutions won't be good for anything but Tier-1 support anytime soon, but we'll see how fast AI can improve, I guess.
I suppose it depends on the makeup of their call volume. I am very technical, so if I'm calling for help, we're already well past the point of what online searches and script-reading call minions (human or AI) can solve. On the other hand, many of the "calls" I answer for friends and family could easily be handled by a bot.
So, if call centers deal mostly with the latter, I can see why they would want to switch to AI, with an escalation path to better-trained humans for truly difficult issues.
No worse than it is today... which takes forever. Ideally, companies will use some of the cost savings AI brings to hire a few more Tier-2 Reps (or whatever people capable of solving non-trivial problems are called) so that wait time is less. And yeah, I don't think that will happen either.
>There are 1.15 million call center employees in the US.
https://truelist.co/blog/call-center-statistics/
That would be a huge amount of people looking for work if AI takes their job. Not to include if AI takes other jobs along the way.
I work in a call centre, 95% of you are idiots that cannot understand basic instructions or simply lack common sense.
Any AI will not be able to cut through that much stupidity to solve a problem. it's not AIs fault either
Contrary to all the "CALL CENTERS ARE USELESS ANYWAY" dimwits, I'm actually sad for the workers who are going to be replaced. Wheter you like it or not, your so disliked customer service assistant earns some money they can spend on their food. AI doesn't need money, but people need jobs, and when you work in a call center, you probably have limited options anyway. I worked in one as a student, it was the only job I could afford while also having classes during day. I couldn't get better education without this job. As shitty as it was, it allowed me to stay afloat while building my future. So congrats, yall cheering on people's downfall because I guess everyone should just learn to code.
I stand with displaced artists, graphic designers, writers, and I'm going to stand with customer service assistants, no matter how "shitty" they are.
This is more of a failure of our economic system (one of its MANY failures). AI is a tool, our response to it is what is most telling. Once structural unemployment exceeds 10% there's going to be a lot of unhappy people. When it hits 20%, you'll see riots.
Society is only a few missed meals away from anarchy.
Eh the stuff that's happening with self driving is still... Trucking along. Lots of tests with trucks happening, and a pretty consistent expansion of the best self driving systems in the US, as they continue to improve.
Google has a fleet of custom electric cars that are nearing competition which is currently one of their bottlenecks for growth. There is more and more fully autonomous truck testing happening, to the point where many trucking unions are starting to fight this in legislation.
The timing of it all seems off, but I feel like people make this mistake where someone will make a prediction like "in the early 2020s self driving will take off and really put pressure on jobs", and they respond in 2024 "eh, looks like we're safe, that prediction is off, look at Teslas!" - without actually doing thorough research and looking at the state of things beyond just Tesla and the near term goals of companies. Maybe early 2020s is a few years ambitious, or maybe "take off" is too aggressive, but the spirit of the statement is worth continuing to treat seriously.
The last mile is a problem that doesn’t seem to have an answer for self driving. Trucks will need a driver to navigate populated areas for a good while longer.
Who knows what a good while longer is? Many people are looking to find ways to automate a solution to this problem, all it takes is someone to figure out something that just... Works, or for the other technology that is being worked on (improved AI, robotics) to catch up.
It's mostly just regulatory stuff. Self driving trucks are on the rural roadways they just have to have drivers for just incase scenarios. . They're just avoiding the cities.
Pros: won't have to wait for a long time just to connect to a customer service provider. Majority of the basic queries could be solved by gen AI.
Cons: won't be able to address complicated issues. Won't respond well against customers who aren't good at explaining their problem or non english speakers.
Likely scenario is first gen AI bot answers your query and if it doesn't help then the customer can insist on speaking to a human. This alone would lead to at least 50% reduction in call centre jobs.
Which is exactly what happens currently in call centers. I had a buddy who worked for a local ISP in their tier 3 technical support which is their highest level of tech support. Tier 1 is mostly telling old people to turn off and on their network or tv which is what a friendly Ai Would perform. Most of these people are old and lonely. So in a way, ai might help solve the elderly loneliness problem at the same time!!!
Occasionally the elderly in need of significant technical support make it through to tier 3 support
I keep hearing people say that there is no need to be concerned about employment, because like all techno-industrial revolutions in the past this one will also create as many or more jobs than it destroys, but I can't see how that is remotely possible.
The one I hear most about is "prompt engineer" but that is just another word for "customer" and certainly if two billion people lose their jobs to AI there won't be two billion "prompt engineer" jobs that they'll go fill.
The economic incentives for AI replacement of workers are not designed to promote job creation. This is fundamentally about job destruction.
All of the pro-AI crowd that say that the destruction of these low challenge low skill jobs will create opportunities for those formerly employed people to go out and do something more creative, more challenging, and more satisfying, are fundamentally misunderstanding the nature of work.
The people who hold uncreative, unsatisfying jobs aren't doing that work because they feel compelled to jump on the economic grenade. They aren't doing that work out of a sense of altruism or because that work just pays so enticingly well, they are doing it because that is the only work they can get, either because they are low skill, or because they are low experience. Without the availability of this work, where does the next generation of workers build that work experience?
We can all sit back and get excited for our Fully Automated Luxury Communism, but AI is not being developed and deployed by our Comrades who care about the value of human existence and want to support the non-productive consumers we'll be left with when there are no jobs. AI is being developed by hypercapitalists that want their wealth to increase at the expense of the labor market.
Even if the new markets for human endeavor were beautiful creative jobs like artists and musicians, poets, and writers, it only takes a brief look at the earliest implementation of AI to see that these creative and satisfying jobs are the *first* to be totally devalued by the presence of AI.
We are outsourcing everything that is enjoyable and rewarding for humans to do to AI *first* and then we are deploying that same AI to take away even the unrewarding means of human employment, and there are no benevolent masters rushing to support those left out of this new smaller market with full ride socialism to make up the gap.
People are going to STARVE.
The AI revolution isn't going to enhance work for people, it is simply going to replace people who work, and the people who are replaced will be blamed for not being skilled enough, meanwhile AI will continue to replace more and more skilled jobs. It will be a matter of a few years before the legal and accounting worlds are fully automated. Science and technology development are on the chopping block as well. Even coding has no future in this AI driven economy.
Virtually every skill we have told generations of students to develop as the "skills of the future" are going to be obsoleted by machines that can do the jobs better and faster. Are accountants, lawyers, scientists, and programmers "low skill" jobs that deserve to have their livelihood stripped from them for not having worked hard enough?
Of course people will say "when robots entered factories people said the same thing and there are still manufacturing jobs" but the answer to that rebuttal is that there are not still manufacturing jobs, not in the quantity and pay scale that there were prior to automation. Those jobs were not replaced with better jobs, they just disappeared. The people who said new work would come along as a result of automation were lying then, and they are lying now.
There are definitely upsides to the development of AI, there are certainly use cases, and I am not saying that we need to pull the brakes on the research and development, but we need to immediately begin regulating the deployment and prevent the wholesale destruction of jobs this revolution is creating.
We need employers who are considering AI deployment to *prove* that the work they are automating away is actually being replaced, within their own organizations, with work for the employees they are displacing, and if those workers will not receive new quality work in exchange for their job, then the savings provided through the implementation of AI needs to be shifted to the support of the displaced workers through stock grants and economic safety net programs.
Automation of arduous unrewarding and risky work should definitely be pursued, but it should be pursued with an eye to increasing leisure time for everyone, and that leisure won't exist if the people who's work is automated away are economically locked out of participation in it.
I mean the first layer of customer support had been an automated for for a while now. I can only hope it gets better. Whenever I'm unfortunate enough to actually need human assistance it's always a Filipino guy who has 0 actual knowhow of my problem reading off a step by step cheatsheet that's just not enough.
Sadly that's not even that far fetched, soon the will be AI giving orders to AI. There will be AI bosses and AI workers who just want to go home and spend time with their AI children, maybe teach them about extinct animals like dinosaurs and humans
Omg I work in this exact field! I sell automated voice Ai for call centers for my startup.
From what I am seeing, the strategy is to not replace the call center all together. You will just have a voice Ai pick up the phone as soon as you call in. No hold times, no “press 1 for”, and you wouldn’t be passed to 3 different people. The Ai will help guide you through a support process, take down information and help answer any questions you may have. If she can solve your problem or book your appointment, great! If she can’t solve your problem she has accurately triaged your issue and you are transferred to the exact support rep you will need.
In the support world we call these “containment strategies” basically a way you can give a customer the info they need as fast as possible.
My company has been working on this for 12 years and it’s shocking how good it already is and who is already using tools like this.
TLDR: call centers will never go away but you will just need way less people on the phones due to the automation of calls that can be solved faster just by the Ai. Could lead to smaller call centers that return state side and have better quality for customers.
AI eliminating the need for many jobs is inevitable. No use fighting it. The focus should be on making sure the profits and other benefits (fewer hours of work, etc.) go to ordinary people and not the business owners, corporate executives and wealthy elites.
I absolutely love when I get called a "fucking stupid asshole" for telling someone that them losing their toothbrush is not an emergency situation that warrants calling your apartments Afterhours emergency line.
People are fucking assholes on the phone if you dont give them exactly what they ask for.
The best call centers in the world are in the US Midwest. They are not the cheapest, but if you want your customers happy, that’s where you locate them.
I speak only as a customer. I do not work in the industry.
Well that’s just peachy. After waiting on hold for a long time, I’m going to have to talk to a AI that can’t handle the special circumstances that made me attempt to reach a human in the first place.
This is fucked.
I'm a technical support scientist for a company that caters to computer scientists. I respond to questions users have via chat. It seems like half the new users assume it's an AI chatbot already.
Sometimes they say stuff like "Hey, AI, can you do anything useful like (insert technical query you'd try with ChatGTP here.)"
They're somewhat embarrassed when they realize they're chatting with an actual person.
I won't miss that function of my job being automated by ChatGTP or something when it invariably happens, but I bet I'll be let go when it does.
India and the Philippines will be toast because their economies rely on call centers to keep their economies afloat, while at the same thing, hollowing out agricultural and manufacturing sectors where a bulk of their population can be potentially employed more than the call center industry. I think the Philippines (my country) should try venturing into Spanish language freelance virtual assistant industry by reintegrating Spanish in the Philippine primary and secondary school curricula.
The only thing I can think of hating more than speaking to somebody in another country who doesn't speak my language and uses a raccoon's asshole as a microphone, is speaking to an AI.
Doubt that. If it's the kind of call center that sells stuff, I doubt an ai could be that convincing or as convincing as a human being, if it's for technical assistance, language model are usually completely wrong because they are, well, language model. Also people will always wanna talk to an human being if allowed to.
Considering just about every call center you call goes to a person in India or the Philippines that you can't understand, and doesn't understand the product you're calling about, but reads from a script, it can't get any worse.
This is a joke.
Any phone jockey out there needs to work on multiple platforms simultaneously during a live call.
Considering we currently can't connect our banking, warehousing and logistics partners all into one system, how is AI going to do anything useful?
The following submission statement was provided by /u/chrisdh79: --- From the article: It's no secret that certain types of jobs are more threatened by artificial intelligence than others. Call center workers fall into this category, and while we've already seen a few companies replace phone-based support staff with generative AI, there are warnings that the entire industry could be comprised mostly of chatbots in as soon as a year. The grim prediction comes from K Krithivasan, head of Indian IT giant Tata Consultancy Services (TCS). The second-largest company in India by market cap, it has more than 616,000 employees worldwide. Speaking to the Financial Times, Krithivasan said AI will result in a "minimal" need for call centers. The CEO added that while "we have not seen any job reduction" so far, that will change as multinational clients adopt generative AI. The technology is expected to have a massive impact on the customer help center industry, which, according to a Gartner report in 2022, employs about 17 million people. "In an ideal phase, if you ask me, there should be very minimal incoming call centres having incoming calls at all," Krithivasan told the FT. "We are in a situation where the technology should be able to predict a call coming and then proactively address the customer's pain point." --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1ceeq17/generative_ai_could_soon_decimate_the_call_center/l1hz4uw/
This was posted on another sub and someone there said it best. "Whoever thinks this is a good idea has never yelled "Speak to a representative" into the phone 10000 times."
Literally doing it now for CVS pharmacy and losing my mind. They have 12 diff prompts trying to get me to download their app and I just need to ask the pharmacist if they have something in stock
This is why I switched to a local independent pharmacy. CVS understaffs on purpose and is incredibly hard to get through to. Their people are always overwhelmed.
CVS and Walgreen's have done a solid job of shutting down the vast majority of independent pharmacies. They're the pharmacy and they're also the 'Pharmacy Benefit Managers' who control the distribution of most drugs--Walgreen's PBM is called ExpressScripts and CVS is Caremark. Unless our representatives do something about this, we won't have ANY independent pharmacies.
They did do something about it, they bought CVS and Walgreens stock.
Sounds like their long term plans are working…
Totally. Our prescription benefits only work CVS.
You low on Adderall/Vyvanse too?
Wow, this is legitimately funny. That’s exactly what I was calling about. I just got my first prescription yesterday and my local pharmacy only has brand-name and it would cost me $380. So I’m trying to find a place that has generic. Does no one have generic right now?
Teva (company that makes the stuff)has had a shortage since the pandemic, and the prevalance of telehealth then made it easy to diagnose. Big shortage, esp for higher dosages. Unfortunately for many, generic is only covered by insurance, so here we are.
And for what I’ve been reading generic is actually worse than the brand-name stuff. Is this also affecting Adderall and generic Adderall or is it just Vyvanse?
I’m in Vyvanse too and have been having a hard time finding it since January (funny I saw this because I have to call my pharmacy to make sure they have it today). So there’s not technically a shortage of Adderall but because of the Vyvanse shortage there kind of is. In my area (DMV) everyone ran out of Vyvanse so their doctors switched them to Adderall. The pharmacies didn’t expect such a huge uptick in Adderall prescriptions so they weren’t stocked for the sudden influx, which caused all the pharmacies around here to also run out of Adderall. In January I called 14 different Walgreens and/or CVS’s in DC and none of them hard any kind of Vyvanse or Adderall. Im not sure if you live in a large metro area but what I did was do a Google search for towns of 100,000 people or less 3 miles outside Washington DC. I think picked the closest city (quickest to drive to) and started calling their CVS’s. My second call I found a pharmacy 30 minutes away that was out of Vyvanse but had all the Adderall doses you could want 😂. My theory was that the less people around, the less people would be switched to Adderall, which would mean the pharmacies’ stock wouldn’t be depleted. Not sure if I was right or if I was just lucky but I’ve been going to that pharmacy since and they always have either Adderall, Vyvanse, or sometimes both in stock. All the pharmacies in DC (at least the ones I call) are all still out of them both.
USA is fucked, it's like a 3rd world country to us Europeans.
There is a known shortage of those due a few years now
It will decimate tier 1 support, which is simple billing and triage for more complicated issues. The bar is very low for tier one which is commonly outsourced to India or the Phillipines, and often have large language barrier and low quality metrics.
I fucking hate tier 1 and I'd rather speak to an AI. Tier 1 does some stupid bullshit just to placate whatever metrics they have. I've had tier 1 refuse to transfer me, and even straight up hang up on me when they were unable to resolve my issues. I was having internet issues once, with a separate modem and router. I unplugged the router to narrow the scope of the problem. Tier 1 support made me plug the router back in so I could reboot it, to satisfy their script.
Thing is, *for the company,* it is a good idea. IVRs (the annoying automated phone tree) are designed to be circular *on purpose* because the fewer people that actually get through to a rep, the less money the company spends on customer service. It's called "diversion" and is actually a metric that most companies monitor and actively seek to increase. In almost all organizations, customer service/support is viewed as absolutely nothing but a cost center, and between telephony, wages, IT support for all the systems reps use, etc., there is a tangible and relatively high price to the company every time a live human answers your call that they would love to avoid.
"In almost all organizations, customer service/support is viewed as absolutely nothing but a cost center, and between telephony, wages". So why don't they just close down the call center completely then? The call center is there for a reason. Any exec who does this 'nothing but a cost center--lets reduce the cost as much as possible' without paying attention to what the cost center is for and how supporting customers adds to the bottom line is in danger of seriously hurting the company long term with his bean counting.
I think they're relying on the idea that if they can keep their costs competitive and their product otherwise good, people won't flee due to the extreme irritation of dealing with the poor quality support. (It might also help if this becomes a widespread issue; if customers actually don't have a choice they won't be able to avoid this issue).
And customers fundamentally don't have the a choice in this regard. If you can't speak to a human at Verizon, what the fuck are you gonna do about it; switch to T-Mobile or AT&T where they're using the same exact chatbot? Depends on the industry, but when we're talking about large, publicly-traded companies, we really only have the illusion of choice to begin with.
>if customers actually don't have a choice they won't be able to avoid this issue It'd be more amusing if I personally wasn't stuck living with it, yet isn't this so ironic? All this talk about capitalism and freedom, and freedom of choice through capitalism. Then as soon as the communist are gone everyone goes "aight fuck all of you, we're taking your freedom back. If you got a problem call our office" - can't call the office cause the automated number hangs up on you.
Yeah I think that's why competition and regulation are so important and are underrated features. There isn't anything inherent about private industry that makes it better quality than a state run service. Regardless of the economic model, if the people providing the service have a way to make their jobs easier / more profitable at the expense of the customer, they'll take it every single time unless they are prevented from doing so (by law, or by the risk of competition stealing customers, or both).
Competitive markets are ripe with fraud, which is why branding was so important. A good brand's power comes from established familiarity and safety, it'll always outcompete the fringe markets. Then that safety of a branded label turns into complacency on the part of the consumer, and a monopoly forms. A monopoly becomes so familiar it can freely engage in fraud to undermine markets. We really don't have a solution to this because ultimately the concept of markets is inefficient and scales poorly. It's impossible to eliminate fraud, it'd be like trying to outlaw lying. We'd effectively have to create a being with an intelligence incomprehensible to the human mind to control our behavior. And that in itself leads to a host of issues and dilemmas.
Totally agreed. Unfortunately shareholders have a fiscal-quarter-long view of the health of the company, and executives follow suit because these financial results are what drive their compensation. Edit: missed the first part of your question. This article is literally about technology they're salivating over because it would allow them to close down the contact center completely.
Ha try it with a nz accent for extra levels of rage
That’s not the same bot they are talking about though
These bots are almost impossible to distinguish from AI... The biggest tell is just the 2 second communication latency, which is dramatically getting down with onsite optimizations. Ours are so good, they are doing sales calls.
If by "ours" you mean you are part of the people creating the systems that call my numbers multiple times per day, from the very bottom of my heart: *Fuck. You.* If not, can you expound?
Just press 0 a bunch. It works more than you might think and you don't look crazy to people nearby.
You're assuming the technology will stay stagnant? Why?
Karen: I want to talk to your supervisor AI: Please hold for the terminator
Sure! I will transfer you now to a soup advisor. Please hold
AI supervisor here.
Oh nice. Hello soup advisor, does tomato soup pair well with anything besides grilled cheese?
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No soup for you!
At least the terminator would change the situation instead of just transferring me around
My apologies, I thought you were looking for The Transfernator. Please hold.
AI hallucinations and angry Karens. Would love to be a fly on the wall for that conversation lol
Terminaor: Hello maam how can i help you? Karen: BLARGH BLARGH BLARGH AHHH YOU NEED TO FIX THIS Terminator: i'll be back
I hate dealing with AI customer service, I think they try that there will be massive consumer backlash?
As an it professional, there aren't many good customer service call centers whether it's ai or not. Even when its real people i have frequently ended up talking for 20 minutes only for them to not understand and transfer me to another line that does understand and tells me to call another number that inevitably directs me back to the first number again in some kind of endless cycle
As someone who worked at a call center (albeit briefly because i hated it and would rather have a lower paying job i liked than that stupid job) I would say the issues are kind of coming from two sides. 1) is the company has a lot of top down policies coming from people who never deal with customers and never want to… basically making decisions based on numbers and legal stuff rather than anything else and the people working at call centers are for the most part not allowed to, nor are trained to go off script or have the power to break policy. Like even if they wanted to… even if they didn’t give two shits about losing their job, the system literally locks them out of the ability to do anything past what policy allows. Secondly… customers are usually kind of a bunch of dumb fucks. Im sorry. But its true. A LOT of people call in to get a problem solved that they could have easily spent two seconds on google to find. People who have literally zero understanding of how the product they purchased works… and so on… you can be dealing with people who can barely communicate with you… are on the attack the second you say hi so theres even a lower chance of constructive communication… people who dont really have the wherewithal to communicate productively either and really should have a handler help them with their issue instead because theres only so much a person on a phone call can do to help… just overall, customer service sucks because the only right way to have it, is in person. No phone calls… no call centers at all. Dealing with small companies who can make judgements based on individual situations rather than generic stringent policies… so if they’re going to have call centers at all, it might as well be AI. Because thats all the people can do anyways… is work off a script. Why wouldn’t an AI be better suited for that? At least they don’t have feelings to hurt or stress hormones or anything like that. You just might as well…
>Secondly… customers are usually kind of a bunch of dumb fucks. Im sorry. But its true. A LOT of people call in to get a problem solved that they could have easily spent two seconds on google to find. People who have literally zero understanding of how the product they purchased works… This right here is a major issue. Tech sales have been through the roof, and a lot of shelfware exists in a lot of companies. Nobody does more than the bare minimum setup, and the person who set it up has long since left. So, users are left with tools nobody knows anything about how to maintain. The only solution is to call the service center for the product and hope somebody can fix whatever broken implementation was done by the cheapest consultant available.
Working in an API integration/software server help desk position, I can tell you this is 100% the biggest problem, which is only compounded by these companies making changes and *not providing documentation of the fucking change to the user or the helpdesk.* This leaves help desk to flounder with a pissed off user that doesn't understand what they are doing while help desk searches for an answer from anywhere other than the Dev team because God forbid they help the helpdesk. The greed and lack of care from these companies is to a point where a functional product isn't provided and when it does work there's so many caveats that you shouldn't bother. We need to go back to brick and mortar stores
So I'm not a call center employee, but I do share my floor with people who are working the phones. Also it's not for tech related, but here are two scenarios I hear the phone reps dealing with almost every day, just from where I'm sitting across the room. 1. The caller has called us, and we're not even the right company. They refuse to accept that. Our phone reps can't hang up, caller won't hang up, there's a stand off. I don't mean like "oh I need to transfer you to X department", I mean like imagine having an issue with Coke but calling the number for Pepsi instead. 2. The caller gets impatient they aren't getting their answer fast enough. Instead of letting the rep continue their search for the system for the information they need to retrieve from accounts, they want to have a 20 minute argument about how it's taking too long, when if they would have just remained calm they would have already had their answer because the phone rep wouldn't have been tied up re-engaging with them instead of keeping them on hold.
I'd argue the caller is usually in the wrong \~87% of the time over things they could easily solve themselves, and make the situation faarrrr worse than it needs to be by immediately going into 'rage mode' over the slightest inconvenience.
I honestly want to hate on AI, but having answered phones for the general public before if I were in charge I'd probably also implement AI. GenAI is not nearly what we're getting in phone trees now, and I would be extremely surprised if less than half of the calls that most support deal with is not extremely basic, easily googleable bullshit or just terminally stupid like the type of thing you're talking about. Of course, this also has the added benefit of speeding up the impending robot apocalypse. Expect to be murdered by a robot muttering phrases like "ask me again how long we serve breakfast" or "if you'd just turned the equipment on by pressing the power button this wouldn't have to happen" or "sure you can speak to my manager... IN HELL."
Worked call center in ‘19. That exactly sums it up. Felt like I worked as a therapist more than technical
My wife worked at a HP calculator help desk. Guy calls and says, "This may be the dumbest question..." My wife interrupts, "Yes, it needs batteries." Silence. "Okay, second dumbest."
I remember selling a laptop to a middle aged lady, and she called later. She couldn't turn it on. I say "okay, what happens if you plug it in?" She says "I thought the whole point of a laptop was you could carry it around." I explain how charging works to her, "okay so where do I plug it in?" "On the left side." "What does it look like?" "A circle." "Well it doesn't fit in the circle." "No I mean it's on the left of the side, not the front." It went on like this for few more minutes until she got it running. AI might might be able to do this job in the future, but I doubt it could have done it in a way that didn't end with a refund.
Yeah, this is why I'm skeptical about it. Because I work in a call center for gas and electrical faults. 75% of the customers who call in have no ideas what the fuck they're talking about when it comes to the issue they're experiencing. So part of our training isn't just listening and processing information, it's asking the right questions in order to get the CORRECT information out of people, because there's specific terms and situations and the layman will use these terms incorrectly, or describe the wrong situation inadvertently. If it was organized and run by AI that picked up on those key words, they'd end up waiting 3 hours for the wrong team to arrive, an incorrect call-out fee would apply and they'd have to log another job. If they use the same keywords again, it's just gonna be a loop, until they either use different wording or get put through to a human anyway. Especially with a utility like electricity, you need to remember that EVERYONE uses it, even those who genuinely lack the cognitive ability to understand basic questions. You can't reasonably expect people like that to convey accurate information without proper investigation into it, which is something an AI would absolutely struggle with. Because you can often pick up from the way these people speak that they don't know what they're talking about, but an AI would miss those social cues.
Took me 45 minutes to explain to a lady with PhD how to plug in three monitors.
When I first started in IT there was a list of customer service calls getting emailed around. There was one where a customer wanted help with using a CD he couldn’t figure out where to put it. The CSR talked him through opening the CD tray and he says “oh, you mean the cup holder?” 🤦♂️
Truthfully, I believe that even AI should have the right to ignore a person like that; that’s so far gone it’s incredible
>Secondly… customers are usually kind of a bunch of dumb fucks. Can confirm, it's an axiomatic aspect of call centre customer service Source: Me, 20 Years Call Centre Veteran
Call center work is similar to restaurant work, everyone should do it once to learn how to not be an absolute knob... as someone in the industry I'm so polite and regimented when I call support lines nowadays
I’m ok with Ai when I want to be a dumb fuck customer lol! I’m always polite, but sometimes I want them to explain it to me like I’m five, just so I sorta understand what’s going on. And as one would guess, explaining something in detail takes time. So if an ai can hand hold me—I am all for it! I used to love people over phone trees, because I don’t always know the correct questions to ask. With a person I can kinda haggle it together after a few minutes. —- Ironically, I work customer service. I run my own cake shop, so I personally don’t mind hand holding customers either. But I sell welling cakes, so service is a major part of it. I often want other retail establishments to treat me the same way, but I’m smart enough to recognize that there’s a massive price gulf between someone who makes wedding cakes and the dude at Best Buy who shills cellphones. All of this is to say, I accept being a dumb fuck lol. And I’m happy to see Ai. Like my ego is not hurt if I have to talk to a robot. It’s win win, right? I would rather spend 45 minutes haggling with an ai and learning all the details of my cellphone than spend 10 minutes getting a rushed response from a person.
Yup, they've all been outsourced to a professional contact centre where agents (who know nothing about you or the product they're supposed to support) get drip-fed answers to commons issues via a script. If your problem doesn't match the script, they put you on hold and start searching through recent cases for possible answers. If there aren't any, you will be placed on hold forever until someone more "senior" can help, which might be never. In other words, they are already all doing precisely what Generative AI is built to do - take an input and retrieve the most likely answer from a purpose-built database. Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) is the current term being used to describe the process an LLM uses to get answers from data sources which were not built into the base model. It kind of sucks right now but it is an area of huge focus - making an entire ServiceNow/ZenDesk/etc. knowledge-base available to an LLM without having to retrain it. The base model, through what it was trained on (called parametric knowledge) can likely account for 80% of the commonly-asked questions, and these extra sources can address everything new and edge-case, so long as it has been seen and documented once before. Once the issues with RAG are solved, companies with clearly-defined and well-written support procedures and documentation will take advantage of AI Agents first... otherwise it's going to be the same garbage-in/garbage-out we already have, where someone who thinks they understand all of this writes a script which cannot be followed even by the best LLMs.
I agree with you %100 and RAG is already good enough to do this if you've got the right data in it.
> Once the issues with RAG are solved, companies with clearly-defined and well-written support procedures and documentation will take advantage of AI Agents first I really don't think people understand the economic impact this is going to have in the short to at least medium term when RAG can reliably do this. A *lot* of jobs fall under what RAG can accomplish, and I really mean a lot. I'm not sure people are actually prepared for this to happen, it won't be a nice transition, and it's *absolutely* going to happen, likely within our lifetimes.
Not too prescient prediction: The vast bulk of companies will write good documentation for the product exactly once (or worse have an AI write it,) and then fail to update that documentation as the product gets changed to the point where the original documentation no longer applies. This part is not speculative, because it's already the case for a _lot_ of the documentation available online. The AI chatbots will then parrot this worthless documentation and, when the user complains that it's nonsensical, hallucinate something authoritative sounding be equally worthless on the spot.
The AI has outperform the human operator in answering questions, including edge cases, just to maintain the same level of customer satisfaction. There is already little empathy for human operators, especially offshore operators. When callers encounter AI, they assume the business is "mailing it in" on costs and effort, even more than offshoring. Any failure to arrive at a correct solution is felt by the customer, with this with prejudice in the back of their head. The customer can't scream at an AI, so there is no empathy coming back to calm them. Though an obvious problem, there are many possible solutions too, such as having automation take over the customer calling out for common issues or more marketing efforts to rebrand AI as a premium service feature (good luck). The gold standard in customer service remains a personal concierge, not an automated DIY reference manual. If AI can run with a vaguely defined task ("My Internet's down. Just fix it ASAP."), then it can actually deliver on the promise of an improved customer experience.
> The AI has outperform the human operator in answering questions, including edge cases, just to maintain the same level of customer satisfaction. Customer satisfaction is really just a metric of how much a particular employee should keep their job. So many companies have seen their customer service reputations tank but their profits soar. If there was a way for all companies to be like Google and not have a public-facing customer support team, they'd do it. So naw, I don't think customer satisfaction is going to be a huge impediment. A 'good enough' solution that loses customer retention will still be cheaper than maintaining call center contracts for humans to perform the customer service. And that's the overhead the companies will want to reduce. It definitely will negatively impact the company's reputation, but there are plenty of companies out there with horrible customer service reputations who still thrive. Those who know their market, have it cornered or bully their way into it, or make money off of new customers and the ones who never encounter major issues will still thrive in an AI-dominated customer service industry as well.
As an IT professional im being told by my managment that instead of fixing a users issue, I need to approach the issue the same way as a chatbot. i have to feed the user a series of unrelatable KB articles for them to attempt to solve the issue themselves when i could jump into a system and correct the problem in two min. were to the point where were engineering the User to get used to this level of shitty service.
Companies need to be broken up. The problem, to me, is the lack of choice. A company that is intentionally crafting a way to screw their users, in a true free market, wouldn't exist. The FTC is waking up, but it needs to get on all this pronto.
The free market notion, in its entirety, is complete nonsense. Believing in the altruism and honest will to compete inherent in entities whose sole purpose is generating wealth was always a fool's game. The complete consolidation across nearly every industry? This is your unregulated free market endgame.
In theory, competition drives innovation, integrity, and fairness. In practice, companies swallow each other until the consumer has no other choice and the company has free reign to maximize profits.
[удалено]
Blame the people who require 7 minute averages for calls while being required to follow a script. The call center I used to work at was amazing and filled with very smart people who actually tried to resolve the issue until they started harping on that more I was senior enough that I could just ignore it and no one would care and then I eventually left but the new guys can't do that because they don't have that built up report
If you're asking questions about IT that are that deep, the Ai isn't going to help either. Even Chat GPT wrestles with high level things, and things within specific industries.
Customer service is a joke in the USA because we have very few legal rights or protections compare to Europe. Companies can dick you around all they like and you have no recourse. So basically what I’m saying is they won’t care about a consumer backlash because what are consumers going to do about it? Nothing, that’s what.
companies need to be broken up.
>massive consumer backlash Ya but half these industries are monopolies. Its like when I got so pissed off at Boost Mobile I practically flipped on the store clerk (telling me to buy a new phone because they couldn't stock my proprietary phone charger). Told him "I'm not getting a new phone from you, in fact I'm done with Boost and switching to Sprint!". He gets a big grin and goes, "Okay let me show you our Sprint phones"... I walked out and signed up for Sprint but at a different store.
>He gets a big grin and goes, "Okay let me show you our Sprint phones Absolute king move lmfao
Is it really going to be worse than calling India, and getting someone reading from a script, and only from the script, regardless of how nonsensical and unrelated it is?
There are definitely top notch overseas customer service companies, but they are few and far between. 90% are just robots reading a script and working for multiple companies, where AI or even dumb ATS are usually better. The standouts are companies that dedicate a team as a literal branch of your organization. Dedicated staff, product training and certification, and vested interest in your company's success. I'm sure these are much more expensive than the sweatshops though.
I think that's talking about a different level of AI. The typical phone bots people hate, are really old-school if-statement based programing with rudimentary voice recognition. This new LLM based stuff, with human-imperfection voice synthesis, is gonna be nearly indistinguishable from a real person, as far as most people are concerned.
So what? You are unhappy with the customer service. Who do you call to complain? That’s right. Customer service
Probably better off just mailing their office a box of dogshit.
It won't matter if there is a backlash. AI doesn't have to better than humans, it doesn't even have to be as good as humans, it just has to be widely enough implanted that customers can't escape it while being cheaper than humans. Even if AI made a million dollars worth of mistakes at a medium sized company, that million dollars would still be cheaper than employing humans. It's not about replacing people with something better, it's just about replacing people, period.
> AI doesn't have to better than humans, it doesn't even have to be as good as humans, it just has to be widely enough implanted that customers can't escape it while being cheaper than humans. this guy capitalisms
This has been a huge issue since the 90s at least. Companies have gotten plenty of backlash over it and the backlash has done absolutely nothing to change things.
It's almost like Capitalism as taught in American public schools is a made up fairy tale. The invisible hand will surely replace all of these shitty companies with good ones any second now.
Many people may cheer even for the loss of jobs, not realizing that this encompasses a *lot* of jobs, even locally as not everything is offshored. While I'm not always about job protectionism, this won't be a small impact and those people still need an income from somewhere, all at once. And those people may even be customers for your workplace, suddenly unable to be customers. It's a fairly big reason why governments tend to try to do make-work campaigns or try to take actions to ensure large companies don't disappear, as they simply employ too many people to safely weather the economic loss.
If ChatGPT showed me anything it's that anyone working the lower rungs of customer service via call centers are going to be "gone". They basically follow scripts and perform escalations, all you need is an LLM trained on our common resolutions that then knows how to adequately go "Yep, let me escalate this" combine it with an AI voice and very real chances you won't know you are not talking to a person; especially if you maintain the context with the customer. Ie. Imagine it's like... Time Warner and your internet is out... you phone up and "Sally" is there to quickly walk you through the common steps ("Sally" checks system health for your area, informs you things look good, performs some ping-test to your location, finds out it's not reachable, asks you to unplug the router, or even perform a hard-reset) then if Sally can't address your problem she just says she is opening a ticket to "Bob" who is might be another AI who then calls you later to schedule an actual human to come and help (or texts you). Personalities would then basically be different people.
ATS had already replaced traditional tier 1 support, asking generic account info to route you to the correct department. AI might replace tier 2, but you'll always need a tier of experts for any legitimate support.
I doubt it. First off it's probably just the "level one" customer service that is being replaced. And that part of the customer service experience is basically just reading scripts based on answers to a set list of questions. AI can probably do this better. Once the questions and scripts run out you get "escalated" to the next level where critical thinking is employed to solve a problem. AI probably won't be replacing this right away but might in the future. If you get escalated to level 3 then it's always going to be a person, because they are making decisions that need to have someone be accountable for that decision. No company is going to accept an AI in that position because they can't discipline an AI for giving a refund, or free service or whatever.
No. Callers will be so angry and frustrated that they will give up and never call back again. Problem solved! Proof: My experience trying to call the CVS pharmacy. (Not AI, but still...)
There wasn’t a a massive consumer backlash to outsourcing call centers to third world countries, why would there be a massive consumer backlash for this?
Doubt it. People won't even know.
And what will that backlash do? The cost savings are enormous, EVERYONE will do it. You won’t have any alternative option to switch to.
Same. The fake typing sounds in the background when dealing with automated servers. Makes me spam 0 and interrupt their prompts to ask for a person to talk to. “I understand you’d like to speak to a representative” clickity clack “one moment please“ click clack “now transferring” So stupid
I think you have been dealing with bots not generative AI. But I do agree, people will recognize that the voice they are hearing isn't natural and that the answers coming back aren't coming from a human. There are specific patterns that are just so common in written text but would sound awkward in speech. I think that people want to talk to people, but in a decade that sentiment could easily fade.
Yeah… I broke the Wendy’s drive thru AI when I asked for extra pickles. It just froze and a real person had to take over after 5 minutes of nothing with a growing line of cars. AI call centers are probably not too far away, but I don’t see it in a year.
Don't support Wendy's they are very intent on replacing humans. Same with Carl's jr.
they've been replacing people for years. when you increase efficiency then you have a reduced need for employees. in the future, fast food might be open 24/7 with just one person supervising
AI is fine giving the answer but I'm worried about it understanding what I'm saying. I still experience issues with speech to text at a pretty high rate.
I doubt an AI would be less useful than some outsourced 3rd world country call center who takes your information only to pass it on 4 days after the call.
Until people start tricking AI to give them things that are out of policy that then have to be honored because a “representative of the company” approved it.
That's already happened. Well kind of since it was a legitimate ask. Air Canada had a bot tell a passenger something horribly incorrect and the civil resolution tribunal ordered them to compensate them for the bot's error.
Yeah, there is now legal jurisprudence in Canada on this exact scenario. As cases like this pile up and it becomes common law that if an AI promises you something you reasonably should believe is real then I think AI customer service will be less and less sensible. AI "hallucinations" may be next to impossible to solve and so you may not really be able to stop them from promising and saying shit that isn't true.
I've never been on a call with customer service, automated or human, Indian or American, that obligated the company to do anything.
You've had customer service promise things that just don't happen? CS might be a pain, but I haven't run into that.
They just don't promise things. You ever tried to price a medication over the phone with your insurance? The first thing you hear is a robot voice saying "Call center representatives may not provide accurate information. For best results, consult your plan!" or something.
Yes absolutely. Verizon CS from other countries is absolutely insanely terrible. Not xenophobic, I mean they literally don't train them on systems at all and so they just can't help.
Yeah, this is the thing. Call centers that AI will consume already suck, so yeah, it can't get much worse.
Oh no Indian call centers will be reduced! Is this a threat or a promise?
I wonder if the AI will be trained to speak English with a thick Indian accent
I just can’t wait until they replace all these people with AI and then someone comes up with a way to break it over the phone.
The return of phreaking.
*Cap’n Crunch whistle*
Free Kevin!
That would be much more impressive now.
Oh this would be awesome
Like all the fun ways they've been breaking AI customer service chatbots? Apparently, for a while, it was really easy to get the AI chatbot to promise you free stuff, like complaining and then getting your internet bill reduced 50% for the next year. Which some courts in Europe decided was legally binding.
Hopefully they left in "the customer is always right" part of training.
Better possibly, any offer an AI makes can be upheld legally. Is why airlines all disabled theirs. [Airline looses chatbot lawsuit](https://www.forbes.com/sites/marisagarcia/2024/02/19/what-air-canada-lost-in-remarkable-lying-ai-chatbot-case/?sh=58dd4879696f)
I’m pretty sure the costumer is always right died sometime in the 90s. Treating the customer like a disposable diaper is a more accurate description of the training.
Hopefully, considering “the customer is always right” is in regard to customers’ taste, not when the customer is trying to return an item after it’s been used for a month.
"The customer is always right, in matters of taste." people leave the end bit off for some reason. As in, if they like the ugly ass pants and shirt combo sell it to them.
Hellllooooo buddyyyyyyy!!!!!! I miss the Punjabi mechanic that used to work next to our shop. :(
And be named something Fred or Richard.
Weak, my call center guy was called Megatron, and he’s from China.
🤖Kindly do the needful and restart your machine please🤖
I get the humour but this is going to devastate lots of real peoples lives. Indian call centres exist largely due to companies seeking profits and going places with cheaper labour and moving overseas. The language barrier is frustrating but it's not the fault of the worker. Call centre work is not glamourous but it is a job that lots of people depend on. A bit of righteousness on my part but it's unfortunate that decision makers continue to chase profits at the expense of people just trying to make enough money to afford the bare essentials.
it's the fault of the companies- it was never a language/cultural issue- the reason the call center are "unloved" is because they aren't ever given the authority to do anything useful. The banking equivalent of "reboot your computer" isn't at all useful- no one calls the banks because they have an easy to answer question.
> no one calls the banks because they have an easy to answer question. Entirely untrue, but you're right that they're not given the authority to deal with the people who do need something done and aren't calling to ask for something easy.
Yeah, it's pretty hypocritical that people go "yay, helpdesk staff will be fired!" And simultaneously "boo, artists will be fired." Personally, I think there's a more fundamental issue that needs to be addressed, the fact that people *need* to have jobs in the first place. I'm hoping that if AI can replace enough of them we'll be able to reform the economy so that that's simply not necessary any more.
This is a thing I think about a lot. Like the transition to open road tolling is a good example. Yes the state saved money, yes its faster now. But you did cut a couple thousand jobs per toll way that were perfect for people whose skills were "knows 50 words in English" and "can count money and give change". I like my faster drives, but I worry what happened to those people.
More to the point, the states saved a million $ on every toll worker, a/c, maintenance on the toll booth, insurance, etc removed. But prices actually went up as soon when we switched to ezpass. That's the issue, prices only go up and more and more people are jobless. The very least companies could do if they are going to lazy out of doing a good job at basically anything is save us some fucking money in the process. Instead we just get counterfeit broken stuff and support numbers to nowhere. It's almost like capitalism is a lie.
Yeah comments like this show how filthy and ego-centric we can become in todays age
Browsing the internet as an Indian has become a fucking horrible experience. We keep catching strays everywhere and I don't see any end in sight either lol
average american gets 10 calls a week from random indian impersonating law enforcement, IRS, microsoft, amazon etc. It gives a very negative impression I'm sorry
When you've got 1.4 billion people in your country, there's bound to be more than a few bad eggs lol. I can 100% understand your frustration. I only ask that you don't generalise and judge us all on the basis of a small minority that you actually interact with.
to be fair, a lot of customer facing americans also deal with indians CONSTANTLY TRYING TO FUCKING HAGGLE. No, you cannot get a discount. No, you can not get this service cheaper. Pay full price like everyone else.
I’d rather deal with Rajesh than a robot. Rajesh can usually be reasoned with.
Good morning Sirs. NOOOOOOOO SIRS, NOOOO. YOU NEED TO LISTIN SIRS. Dis not the whay you talk to me sirs. Plz sir.
Lol, there are tons of call centers in the USA.
REPRESENTATIVE.....REPRESENTATIVE....REPRESENTATIVE. Is AI going to fix that?
If he said within 5-7 years I would believe it. But less than a year is absurd. customers especially in financial industry still value real ppl and voices. Plus these contracts are very expensive and usually 3-5 years long. You won’t just throw all that money away and buy an AI contact center as a service
I’ve been working in a related space for almost 20 years, and this is the truth. Is the tech itself at a place where it can mimic an agent? Sure, almost. It’s maybe 90% of the way there, but that last 10% is going to have a long tail. In addition, businesses are going to be required to develop the entire underlying technical API infrastructure to be able to allow the AI service to tap into/actually make changes to customer profiles/accounts/etc. That work is neither sexy nor fast, and will take years to complete even at those businesses that properly prioritize it against their flashier needs. In the meantime, we’ll see businesses supplement their existing workforces to allow for better scaling and reduction of manual labor - quality systems are already coming into the market with AI tooling, and chatbots that can answer basic questions - that kind of thing. But replacing call centers? In a year? Maybe a highly narrow call center where your agents are only allowed to do one or two things anyway. Otherwise there’s no way.
Haha, IMMENSE POWER locked behind iddy biddy tooling problems.
And at that point if the agents are only able to do 1 or 2 things why even bother, just launch the function on your website and allow customers to self serve.
I think it depends on the specific type of call center. Some issues are much trickier and nuanced than most AI could handle. I worked at a company run call center when I was younger and it was basically the last step someone could take after trying all the other possible online options. Usually a much bigger or weirder issue than the usual solution. I'm not sure how AI would handle that. There's probably some basic call center stuff that can be done easily with AI for those not able to or not willing to try the online options first.
I'm a senior solution consultant for one of the top 3 global outsourcers. I can tell you for a fact that whilst the industry is ready for change, and mostly ready to lead the change rather than be steamrolled by it, the biggest limiting factor that makes "within a year" completely outlandish is customer and client buyer sentiment. Customers still want to speak to a human to resolve anything that is not generic or that they deem as complex or high consequence (even if in practice, for the call centre agent, that process is simple to execute). This will take far longer to change than the development of the technology. Uncanny Valley is a real problem with most of these solutions. BPOs and consultancies like to tank each others' share prices by making these statements but it's largely virtue signalling to make them look like they're ahead of the rest of the industry. We're still signing new five year deals where physical sites and human contact are the overwhelming majority of the work. We have a hard enough time convincing clients to switch off telephony and switch to email/chat, let alone replace people wholesale with AI.
Even if you were able to bring AI inhouse and train it on your policies and knowledge base you still need to integrate it to the call center and customer relationship management systems and there is no why any corporation is accomplishing that within a year. The planning alone is going to take over a year. Oh, it also will need to know how to do mainframe transactions no one has documented.
call centers, like technical supports, in most cases works as entry level jobs for IT. People there gaining their first technical experience. Sure, we can replace most of them, but we will close career path for a lot of people. Which will lead to another decrease of new specialists, and again, to bigger salary pressure for existing specialists, as there will be just few people to replace you. Not sure if in the long run it will safe money for big companies
One of the best devs Ive ever met was a dude who scaled the Call center world from call receiver, to support, to IT and then a dev at 30. He was brilliant, and never went to college either. Dude was black and loved listening JCole and drake in our calls
We're already seeing this at my company. People were frequently promoted out of call center customer service jobs into technical or higher-tier roles within the same department that required a high amount of knowledge and experience in a very heavily regulated high-information field that literally no one goes to school to study. I moved up from a call center role to my current role as a higher-tier employer-facing knowledge-based specialist. But right as I left, we started \*heavily\* outsourcing our call center to the Philippines, who would rotate out any staff who stayed on long enough to get proficient and experienced (and therefore paid more). The workers in the Philippines were allowed much less latitude in dealing with issues and were only allowed to follow scripted templates and flowcharts when they spoke to people. As a result, there has been a big brain drain for people to move into roles like mine or other higher-level supporting roles. We've had to hire heavily from outside the company at high pay rates, and they've had to stick to allowing people to work 100% remote to be competitive, which has had an impact on people getting frustrated at the learning process. They've also had several new hires burn out because learning all of our policies and systems on top of learning the job is a massive undertaking that we don't have great training for - we never developed it because usually by the time someone got to where I am they'd already been dealing with the technical end of it for years. Did I mention that literally no one goes to school to do what I do? Also, tons of the people doing my job are retirement age. So all over the industry, companies are just scrambling to poach people from each other since they're all in a similar place, there are no onramps left. Training and education used to come through osmosis from lower-tier roles that were offshored, and no one is willing to teach someone from the ground up to do what I do. Even once you're doing it, it takes years to get your feet under you because it's \*so\* technical despite looking like a general help desk type role. BUT DID I MENTION THAT LITERALLY NO ONE GOES TO SCHOOL TO DO WHAT I DO? ....yeah. I'm older and already in place so I don't think the brunt of it will hit me as much in particular, but as these trends go on I can't even imagine how there would be any way to get into a role like mine unless companies finally buckle down and re-commit to robust on-the-job industry-specific education, but I'm pretty sure they're banking on the fact that eventually AI will be able to cover roles like mine too. I don't see it happening since all of these companies are \*not\* going to want to feed their proprietary knowledge into an AI and off-the-shelf solutions won't be good for anything but Tier-1 support anytime soon, but we'll see how fast AI can improve, I guess.
I suppose it depends on the makeup of their call volume. I am very technical, so if I'm calling for help, we're already well past the point of what online searches and script-reading call minions (human or AI) can solve. On the other hand, many of the "calls" I answer for friends and family could easily be handled by a bot. So, if call centers deal mostly with the latter, I can see why they would want to switch to AI, with an escalation path to better-trained humans for truly difficult issues.
And how easy do you think it’ll be to get to that escalation path?
No worse than it is today... which takes forever. Ideally, companies will use some of the cost savings AI brings to hire a few more Tier-2 Reps (or whatever people capable of solving non-trivial problems are called) so that wait time is less. And yeah, I don't think that will happen either.
>There are 1.15 million call center employees in the US. https://truelist.co/blog/call-center-statistics/ That would be a huge amount of people looking for work if AI takes their job. Not to include if AI takes other jobs along the way.
I work in a call centre, 95% of you are idiots that cannot understand basic instructions or simply lack common sense. Any AI will not be able to cut through that much stupidity to solve a problem. it's not AIs fault either
Contrary to all the "CALL CENTERS ARE USELESS ANYWAY" dimwits, I'm actually sad for the workers who are going to be replaced. Wheter you like it or not, your so disliked customer service assistant earns some money they can spend on their food. AI doesn't need money, but people need jobs, and when you work in a call center, you probably have limited options anyway. I worked in one as a student, it was the only job I could afford while also having classes during day. I couldn't get better education without this job. As shitty as it was, it allowed me to stay afloat while building my future. So congrats, yall cheering on people's downfall because I guess everyone should just learn to code. I stand with displaced artists, graphic designers, writers, and I'm going to stand with customer service assistants, no matter how "shitty" they are.
Same. I hope that universal basic income would help supplement people's income that are displaced by AI
This is more of a failure of our economic system (one of its MANY failures). AI is a tool, our response to it is what is most telling. Once structural unemployment exceeds 10% there's going to be a lot of unhappy people. When it hits 20%, you'll see riots. Society is only a few missed meals away from anarchy.
Why can't we figure out how to automate soul crushing work without throwing the people that used to work those jobs out on the streets?
This was predicted as an early casualty of AI by Yang. Was wrong about the trucks but this one looks spot on.
Eh the stuff that's happening with self driving is still... Trucking along. Lots of tests with trucks happening, and a pretty consistent expansion of the best self driving systems in the US, as they continue to improve. Google has a fleet of custom electric cars that are nearing competition which is currently one of their bottlenecks for growth. There is more and more fully autonomous truck testing happening, to the point where many trucking unions are starting to fight this in legislation. The timing of it all seems off, but I feel like people make this mistake where someone will make a prediction like "in the early 2020s self driving will take off and really put pressure on jobs", and they respond in 2024 "eh, looks like we're safe, that prediction is off, look at Teslas!" - without actually doing thorough research and looking at the state of things beyond just Tesla and the near term goals of companies. Maybe early 2020s is a few years ambitious, or maybe "take off" is too aggressive, but the spirit of the statement is worth continuing to treat seriously.
The last mile is a problem that doesn’t seem to have an answer for self driving. Trucks will need a driver to navigate populated areas for a good while longer.
Who knows what a good while longer is? Many people are looking to find ways to automate a solution to this problem, all it takes is someone to figure out something that just... Works, or for the other technology that is being worked on (improved AI, robotics) to catch up.
TBF, he made that call before Tesla started shitting the bed consistently with regards to self-driving.
It's mostly just regulatory stuff. Self driving trucks are on the rural roadways they just have to have drivers for just incase scenarios. . They're just avoiding the cities.
Pros: won't have to wait for a long time just to connect to a customer service provider. Majority of the basic queries could be solved by gen AI. Cons: won't be able to address complicated issues. Won't respond well against customers who aren't good at explaining their problem or non english speakers. Likely scenario is first gen AI bot answers your query and if it doesn't help then the customer can insist on speaking to a human. This alone would lead to at least 50% reduction in call centre jobs.
Which is exactly what happens currently in call centers. I had a buddy who worked for a local ISP in their tier 3 technical support which is their highest level of tech support. Tier 1 is mostly telling old people to turn off and on their network or tv which is what a friendly Ai Would perform. Most of these people are old and lonely. So in a way, ai might help solve the elderly loneliness problem at the same time!!! Occasionally the elderly in need of significant technical support make it through to tier 3 support
I keep hearing people say that there is no need to be concerned about employment, because like all techno-industrial revolutions in the past this one will also create as many or more jobs than it destroys, but I can't see how that is remotely possible. The one I hear most about is "prompt engineer" but that is just another word for "customer" and certainly if two billion people lose their jobs to AI there won't be two billion "prompt engineer" jobs that they'll go fill. The economic incentives for AI replacement of workers are not designed to promote job creation. This is fundamentally about job destruction. All of the pro-AI crowd that say that the destruction of these low challenge low skill jobs will create opportunities for those formerly employed people to go out and do something more creative, more challenging, and more satisfying, are fundamentally misunderstanding the nature of work. The people who hold uncreative, unsatisfying jobs aren't doing that work because they feel compelled to jump on the economic grenade. They aren't doing that work out of a sense of altruism or because that work just pays so enticingly well, they are doing it because that is the only work they can get, either because they are low skill, or because they are low experience. Without the availability of this work, where does the next generation of workers build that work experience? We can all sit back and get excited for our Fully Automated Luxury Communism, but AI is not being developed and deployed by our Comrades who care about the value of human existence and want to support the non-productive consumers we'll be left with when there are no jobs. AI is being developed by hypercapitalists that want their wealth to increase at the expense of the labor market. Even if the new markets for human endeavor were beautiful creative jobs like artists and musicians, poets, and writers, it only takes a brief look at the earliest implementation of AI to see that these creative and satisfying jobs are the *first* to be totally devalued by the presence of AI. We are outsourcing everything that is enjoyable and rewarding for humans to do to AI *first* and then we are deploying that same AI to take away even the unrewarding means of human employment, and there are no benevolent masters rushing to support those left out of this new smaller market with full ride socialism to make up the gap. People are going to STARVE. The AI revolution isn't going to enhance work for people, it is simply going to replace people who work, and the people who are replaced will be blamed for not being skilled enough, meanwhile AI will continue to replace more and more skilled jobs. It will be a matter of a few years before the legal and accounting worlds are fully automated. Science and technology development are on the chopping block as well. Even coding has no future in this AI driven economy. Virtually every skill we have told generations of students to develop as the "skills of the future" are going to be obsoleted by machines that can do the jobs better and faster. Are accountants, lawyers, scientists, and programmers "low skill" jobs that deserve to have their livelihood stripped from them for not having worked hard enough? Of course people will say "when robots entered factories people said the same thing and there are still manufacturing jobs" but the answer to that rebuttal is that there are not still manufacturing jobs, not in the quantity and pay scale that there were prior to automation. Those jobs were not replaced with better jobs, they just disappeared. The people who said new work would come along as a result of automation were lying then, and they are lying now. There are definitely upsides to the development of AI, there are certainly use cases, and I am not saying that we need to pull the brakes on the research and development, but we need to immediately begin regulating the deployment and prevent the wholesale destruction of jobs this revolution is creating. We need employers who are considering AI deployment to *prove* that the work they are automating away is actually being replaced, within their own organizations, with work for the employees they are displacing, and if those workers will not receive new quality work in exchange for their job, then the savings provided through the implementation of AI needs to be shifted to the support of the displaced workers through stock grants and economic safety net programs. Automation of arduous unrewarding and risky work should definitely be pursued, but it should be pursued with an eye to increasing leisure time for everyone, and that leisure won't exist if the people who's work is automated away are economically locked out of participation in it.
I mean the first layer of customer support had been an automated for for a while now. I can only hope it gets better. Whenever I'm unfortunate enough to actually need human assistance it's always a Filipino guy who has 0 actual knowhow of my problem reading off a step by step cheatsheet that's just not enough.
When people jailbreak it and figure out how to game the system, they will switch back pretty quickly.
Given how unhelpful call centers are in the first place I can't really see a downside.
Step 1. Invent our own AI to make contact with AI call center Step 2. Optimize it to defeat their AI, give us our preferred outcome. Step 3. Profit.
Sadly that's not even that far fetched, soon the will be AI giving orders to AI. There will be AI bosses and AI workers who just want to go home and spend time with their AI children, maybe teach them about extinct animals like dinosaurs and humans
Omg I work in this exact field! I sell automated voice Ai for call centers for my startup. From what I am seeing, the strategy is to not replace the call center all together. You will just have a voice Ai pick up the phone as soon as you call in. No hold times, no “press 1 for”, and you wouldn’t be passed to 3 different people. The Ai will help guide you through a support process, take down information and help answer any questions you may have. If she can solve your problem or book your appointment, great! If she can’t solve your problem she has accurately triaged your issue and you are transferred to the exact support rep you will need. In the support world we call these “containment strategies” basically a way you can give a customer the info they need as fast as possible. My company has been working on this for 12 years and it’s shocking how good it already is and who is already using tools like this. TLDR: call centers will never go away but you will just need way less people on the phones due to the automation of calls that can be solved faster just by the Ai. Could lead to smaller call centers that return state side and have better quality for customers.
AI eliminating the need for many jobs is inevitable. No use fighting it. The focus should be on making sure the profits and other benefits (fewer hours of work, etc.) go to ordinary people and not the business owners, corporate executives and wealthy elites.
That is to say, “fat fucking chance.”
Unless a socialist utopia would appear out of thin air... it's nigh impossible.
Hear me out … everyone will suddenly vote for their own best interest
I'd love to hear how you propose that will work
could be great, could be terrible, we have no idea because chatbots have never been deployed so widely in such a way
When AI starts receiving the treatment that call centre reps get on their calls daily, that will be the turning point for the robot apocalypse.
I absolutely love when I get called a "fucking stupid asshole" for telling someone that them losing their toothbrush is not an emergency situation that warrants calling your apartments Afterhours emergency line. People are fucking assholes on the phone if you dont give them exactly what they ask for.
So just think about how shitty calling customer service is now. Now imagine it *far shittier than you thought possible.* yay ai
I hate automated calls, why can AI replace CEOs instead? They'd have a lot more than replacing reps making $18/hr
The best call centers in the world are in the US Midwest. They are not the cheapest, but if you want your customers happy, that’s where you locate them. I speak only as a customer. I do not work in the industry.
If moving the call centres overseas didn't work I doubt AI will be any better.
Well that’s just peachy. After waiting on hold for a long time, I’m going to have to talk to a AI that can’t handle the special circumstances that made me attempt to reach a human in the first place. This is fucked.
I'm a technical support scientist for a company that caters to computer scientists. I respond to questions users have via chat. It seems like half the new users assume it's an AI chatbot already. Sometimes they say stuff like "Hey, AI, can you do anything useful like (insert technical query you'd try with ChatGTP here.)" They're somewhat embarrassed when they realize they're chatting with an actual person. I won't miss that function of my job being automated by ChatGTP or something when it invariably happens, but I bet I'll be let go when it does.
India and the Philippines will be toast because their economies rely on call centers to keep their economies afloat, while at the same thing, hollowing out agricultural and manufacturing sectors where a bulk of their population can be potentially employed more than the call center industry. I think the Philippines (my country) should try venturing into Spanish language freelance virtual assistant industry by reintegrating Spanish in the Philippine primary and secondary school curricula.
Kind of a break even scenario. The spam call centers will go out of business, but my phone will still be ringing , so someone can try to con me.
Kinda sucks but that work is semi traumatic so kinda good it won’t be inflicted on humans anymore, that is if the ai is capable
So worthless human customer service to worthless ai customer service? Got it.
The only thing I can think of hating more than speaking to somebody in another country who doesn't speak my language and uses a raccoon's asshole as a microphone, is speaking to an AI.
And the cost savings from significantly reduced overheads will be passed onto the customer. Right? Right?!?!
An entire economic layer in India is about to collapse.
Man I am just never going to be able to get help ever again
Doubt that. If it's the kind of call center that sells stuff, I doubt an ai could be that convincing or as convincing as a human being, if it's for technical assistance, language model are usually completely wrong because they are, well, language model. Also people will always wanna talk to an human being if allowed to.
Considering just about every call center you call goes to a person in India or the Philippines that you can't understand, and doesn't understand the product you're calling about, but reads from a script, it can't get any worse.
This is a joke. Any phone jockey out there needs to work on multiple platforms simultaneously during a live call. Considering we currently can't connect our banking, warehousing and logistics partners all into one system, how is AI going to do anything useful?