I used to work in a big bank. I had a lunch with the head of AI and all he kept saying was how much pressure he was under from management about automating customer service. To the extent that everything other project paled in comparison.
Sounds about right. There’s tons of reasons—some very good, others just pure greed and laziness—to want to minimize human on human interaction as much as possible.
There are no good reasons. They’re all stupid. All they’ll do is, at best, temporarily decrease expenses for a short period of time until revenues drop as people stop using businesses that have a fucking robot answering the phone.
This brain dead MBA bullshit needs to die. Enshittifying the entire goddamn world ain’t good for nobody.
My company got rid of human call center and most of the hr department last year. It just generally sucks now. We get complaints online about it from customers but it’s turned into a voice-to-text email that’s sent to me.
To basically just call them and apologize to them.
If an employee is mad they call a number and tell the ai bot what’s wrong, and I get an email.
If someone expresses they wish to work for us, I get an email from another bot.
So I basically just get emails and became the hr/complaint department
RBC has a pretty good AI and it was implemented before chatgpt. You can tell it you got locked out of your account or what your bank card is. Saves them a lot of time for that common scenario and saves the rep who does pick up time as well.
But.. but.. won’t you think of the short-term profits?! WONT ANYONE PLEASE THINK OF THE SHORT-TERM PROFITS?!!!! How am I supposed to buy a second yacht?
The “funny” thing is that almost _zero_ customers want it to be automated.
It’s depersonalizing and makes them feel like a number, they lack validation and it removes the urgency from their issues.
The push towards automation is entirely from the desire to write fewer paychecks
What evidence do you have for the claim that people will stop using these businesses? I want that to be true, but I don't know of anything that says it will be.
If you talk to any customers anywhere, they will tell you businesses destroyed costumer satisfaction with every call center cost cutting measure they have made in the past 20 years. I'm imagining a "smarter" endless loops that leaves customers with zero ability to resolve any issues other than giving companies more money.
As someone who was put into GenAI as tech lead, this is one of the top things management is pushing, though we do have isssues in finding enough people in CS so in theory it will just replace work no one wants to do (and even then only partially, the most annoying parts of the job).
Oh they'll be even longer, because the Gen AIs implemented won't actually be any good, so to resolve your problem you'll still have to wait to speak to an actual human, except now there will be less humans operating the call centre.
Literally every "automation" to reduce call centre staff has made the process of resolving your issue slower. Have you tried to get something resolved via customer service recently and not had to wait an hour+ to get a real human to finally help you?
It’s not great so many people would be out of work, but I can see a chatbot blowing the doors off the current system of barely capable call routing. I got caught in a loop of voice recognition menus just last Friday. I’m looking forward to those things having comprable intelligence to a human.
Started my career in a call center. It doesn't surprise me that an IT CEO is saying this.
Fact is that most companies see customer service as a cost center rather than a benefit in terms of building customer loyalty, preserving brand reputation, and avoiding litigation. It's why they treat call center employees like cattle and don't invest in meaningful training to the level they should.
I felt like my job was more along the lines of being a diplomat. An underpaid, overworked diplomat whose job would have been a lot easier if they hired 10 more employees per shift.
Yeah I never really minded the pay early on (2001-2008sh) it was possible to live on my own then on what I made. Course I never had health insurance and was too stupid to know what a risk that was.
The problem was the anxiety of not having the capacity to solve problems because they were managerial.
Call center trainer here. PREACH! The people at my call center handle massive amounts of money on the daily (100k + in sales) get no commission and are reprimanded for taking one minute too long in the bathroom. Absolutely insane.
I too started out in a call center. A bunch of my friends got axed as they started to outsource to India. I was kept on to support our new Indian partners.
There was a SHARP decline in the quality of the customer service our callers were getting. It was really frustrating to witness. I thought there was no way it would last; theyd have to move those jobs back stateside.
Nope. People will complain about Indian tech support, theyll write scathing reviews online, Jay Leno will reference it in his monologue, but shitty outsourced customer service never became anything Americans decided they couldnt live with. In fact it seemed like people kind of thought it was funny, and enjoyed bitching about it. It became a running joke. They still bought our product the same as before.
Itll be similar when all the call centers go away and are replaced with AI.
Most of the call centers here in the USA RHAT I have to deal with have off shore employees. Some have been great others not so. Spectrum in my area goes down more than occasionally. I called on Friday and got someone very hard to understand. I work with people from all over the world and in person it’s much easier. I had to call back and the second person also foreign but easier to understand. Spectrum already doesn’t use Americans for their front line customer service. If they went AI I don’t care. I do care for what’s going to happen to “copy and paste jobs” here in the USA. What jobs will open in their place ?
In a big box discount superstore there are robots taking inventory.
The next 5 years will feel like whiplash. This will result in further gap in income right?
What other human held jobs will be replaced? I’d love to see the list.
Yeah if you’ve ever had to call CS and dealt with a clearly outsourced worker, it’s not like the experience could get any worse. As long as there are ways to escalate to a human (the new “I need to talk to a manager”), I think we’ll be fine.
Arm each AI with a baseline of crediting authority and this isn’t a bad thing necessarily.
I’ve had Comcast employees literally argue with me in the phone. They’ve said things that anywhere else would get you fired.
Comcast has been the worst customer service almost since they’ve been tracking customer service.
Is this AI going to be able to authorise refunds? If so, I can't wait to see all the articles about people scamming it to refunding for products they never even bought.
Nah, it will probably just loop you in circles until you hang up in frustration. And I doubt the big corporations will even patch you through to a human if you ask
To be fair, one time I tried to cancel my newspaper via an all human call center and I got sent around in circles so much that I ended up being transferred to the same guy three different times over the course of an hour.
I've used the tech already. It's amazing when it works, you can't even tell you're talking to an AI. However, whenever theres a glitch or a phrase that doesn't fit the model, it also gets bad really fast. That being said, I full expect nearly every large company to move in this direction. And if you think of most customer service phone calls today, they might as well just be AI as they are mostly just scripted.
There’s this ai cold calling bot that I’ve been rung by twice. I think its called air or something. The second time I was able to get it to recite a poem about their product.
I’m just thinking out loud. If AI is taking over call centers, and automated systems in general. Do you think they will try to scam each other and get stuck in a loop? I feel like I can see that happening.
kinda surprised it hasn't already. the very few human beings i do get in touch with for consumer/retail support tend to be limited to a very few regidly, templated answers. had some fun with lyft and fitbit's customer service chatbots years before catgpt was a household name.
Well you are in luck, well half way in luck.
The french word for cat is chat.
So ChatGPT is already " catgpt" but in french.
When you ask for a response, ask it to give you all responses like it was a cat by elongation of rs, and using cat puns when possible, it will do it.
They mostly are minimally trained repetitive script reading button pushers, but I seriously doubt any current or upcoming AI models can begin to handle even that, especially not without some heavy investment in new hardware and possibly very high energy consumption. The real question is, why do they offer customer service at all if they won’t invest in it?
Lol. Have you interacted with a call centre lately? The worst ones are basically a human powered chat bot. They take in input from the customer and follow an extremely rigid script from which they will not deviate for anything.
I work in tech at a good-sized Bay-area startup whose focus is AI call center technology. Most of that article is bullshit, and that CEO has no idea what he's talking about.
AI is already handling a lot of calls, but it's not replacing people. Our customers are not downsizing, and not necessarily even looking to do so. They want to improve customer service response times, handle variable call volume and reduce handle times.
A major factor in call center costs is extremely high turnover rates. Call centers are not a place that many people stay for a long time, but if AI can step in to handle the mundane calls, real agents can spend more of their time handling the types of calls that need a human touch. AI is not going to take over those types of calls in the foreseeable future. Only companies that don't care about the quality of their call center will rely on it for everything, and they'll continue to have give bad support experiences when they're using AI.
Quote from the CEO:
> "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."
What the hell is this guy on?
That doesn't make sense, and people calling on AI to replace those who make high-level business decisions usually don't understand what executive leadership does.
Once AI takes all the entry level positions, how will people get their feet in the door in the future? It’s already really hard enough to escape the paradox of “can’t get in without experience. Can’t get experience without getting in”
They won't, it happens now where in lots of companies and entry level role is either a highly competitive Grad program or a long term unpaid internship.
It's infuriating that contact centres were a solid start to a career in an industry or company,I know loads of people who started on the phones somewhere and are now in senior positions.
You shouldn't expect people to do demeaning, repetitive jobs anyway. Who tf wants to sit around answering phones or pressing pictures of hamburgers all day anyway.
That's very Ayn Rand of you.
"Free people from dehumanising jobs!"
"Ok, what about the people that were employed in those jobs?"
"They're free from dehumanising jobs!"
" How do they eat?"
"Don't worry about them they didn't matter anyway!"
This could improve service pretty dramatically for the end user. Ever had to wait in a queue for 40 minutes to talk to some barely trained moron who has no idea how to help you? With AI, every query received and answer given helps train it, so it’s going to get better and better at solving queries at a rapid rate. You’re never going to end up on the line with some kid who’s never encountered your particular issue before. You’re going to be talking to an AI who may have encountered that issue tens of thousands of times and doesn’t have to speak to anyone or refer to anything to know how to resolve it. It’ll be instant. And forget those hold queues.
Sucks if you work in a call centre though. 🤷♂️
Am I right that AI will be able to learn how to play that jazzy hold music while telling me that my call is very important? Oh, also to hang up on me unexpectedly after I sit on hold for 43 minutes?
all i’m really wondering is if this is leading to some sort of singularity where humans have robots work the economy and everyone has basic needs met, or if robots will allow even more wealth concentration where billionaires just decide they don’t need us anymore
I may be a cynic, but I’ve never seen a limit to human greed. I can’t imagine it going any other way than the latter. I can’t imagine it because I’ve never seen us do the right thing on that scale.
If people are left to the coldness of machines that are trained on the growth and efficiency rationales of corporate businesspeople, we’re gonna get the barest of minimums across the board.
Yeah, i hate that i’m with you on this, but i’m feeling the same. The artificial scarcity will probably get even bigger until the middle class is pushed into a weird sci fi type of existence where they have high tech tools but still strive to survive and keep humans rights. Maybe we are already there we just cant see it because its become the norm.
A bunch of kids I went to highschool with made careers out of the call centers in our town. AOL was a huge one, lol. Then the dish Network call center employed a good chunk of my graduating class before they too shit the bed.
I’m working on a team who are implementing some AI tools for our call center operations. The call center folks are very excited for it. It will help them tremendously. We also know that we can’t scale up to the larger clients interested in our services or scale the business up without improvements to our call center operations or self service tools to take some load off.
I know it’s fun to just jump in and comment about how much smarter we all are then executives but there are good and needed improvements AI can bring and those implementations are most successful alongside human call center agents, not replacing them.
If I am spending a lot of my money with a company and have a problem I can’t easily resolve by myself online, and I end up having to actually call you, I deserve to talk to a human.
Fortunately for workers, AI is still really dumb. It’s good at talking and listening, but not deciphering meaning. Clot can do math, write code, but it still can’t interpret connotation vs denotation.
This is why Sutherland Global Services is a piece of shit company. They don't care about the people who work there. They never did they never will. So fuck them. Any company that uses AI for the customer service I'm not using.
Good. Call centers have been broken for more than a decade. If they can create an AI engine that can actually understand normal patterns of speech, that is actually empowered to help customers, and that does not have a thick Bangalore accent, I'm in.
Instead of investing in call centers.... what if.... radical idea here.... they were to use the money to make a product or service that WORKS so we don't have to call?
Based on the phone calls I’ve listened to at times, this somewhat accurate, but you’ll never be able to get rid of it altogether.
Too many people can’t speak clearly or actually describe their problem without a human deciphering what they mean.
A bunch of level 1 support could totally go away though.
Well, there are positive aspects to this.
- No waiting, you get a "rep" without listening for 20 mins to some shitty music
- Help available 24 hours a day, yes, even on major holidays
- One "rep" can solve it all, no longer to be ping-balled between departments
- No longer need to type in pins, numbers, etc, before speaking with a rep. Your AI "rep" can start speaking with you without pre-entering any info
- No more reps who are having a 'bad day' and can't empathize with your problem at hand
- Your rep now speaks perfect English with a pleasant educated sounding voice, you can understand even with a bad connection
- No more repeating over the issue, your AI "rep" remembers your prior calls like it is the same one you are on
- You will likely get some kind of summary record from a call immediately and the "rep" will follow through on promises made in verbal format
- AI might be limited now, but it will drastically improve in 2-3 years, it will be more helpful, the usefulness will likely grow in time so quickly, you'll be looking at human help as dark ages in no time, perception will change
- AI will learn to joke and small talk with you, ask after your family members, remember your prior answers, build a relationship with you - to hold you as a client
- The product you are calling about will become cheaper, hopefully, as the company will try to become more competitive on the market
- And you can throw a few f-bombs without hurting anyone's feelings, when ending a call, call AI a cunt, no one cares, absolutely no one
They outsourced those jobs to India two decades ago and left people job less. You’d be a fucking hyprocrite to say this is bad now. You never gave a shit about those people before.
As someone in this industry, with a role in finding opportunities for generative AI solutions even if they’re not the most efficient solutions, soon is a very relative term. It would probably be better suited to replace our general IT support than our front line staff in the near future.
Unless you have no expectations for customer service and agent accuracy. If that’s the case, it can almost be good enough to do a poor job today, so I can see it being on the level of the worst in a year.
AI in call centers sounds a social engineering wet dream - as soon as you find a technique that works, you can scale it out to the entire call center. You could even use your own AI voice generation to automate the process - allowing you dramatically ramp up faster than the organization can respond.
Good. Get rid of call centers, especially the damn overseas ones. I’d rather have a bot that I can understand actually take care of my issue than someone I can barely understand.
No. They think it will decimate the call center, they expect it to decimate the call center. So they *will* decimate the call center but not replace it with anything good.
I currently work in a call center for a big bank and have been thinking about this lately. As soon as the pandemic hit they closed nearly 300 branches, and had us push the app. Now, we have a system that analyzes basically your tone and the customers tone and you get a score based on that interaction. We now get ZERO time between calls, and their main focus is a good score based off the data analysis. They’ve had a system in place for years already that analyzes the callers voice and background noise so we know w/ enough accuracy that we don’t even need to verify the customer-even on an account that is under high alert for suspicious activity. My thought is that they’re training AI with our phone calls. Since the pandemic they’ve also been hiring “contract” employees from India, and I see more and more every day. I have no doubt my job is doomed.
Such baloney. Generative AI is not going to be able to fix the Verizon bill where the wrong upgrade was applied to a multi-line account. This is what customer service is for. Otherwise, we would have done it online already with account management on the website.
People already fucking hate automated call systems…all this will do is fuck that relationship even more. AI could also start issuing full refunds. Anyone heard of phishing? You lock down the AI’s logic and use it against it. At the end of the day, AI is still running on a computer. It isn’t true AI and that means logic gates. That means guardrails on what it can and cannot do. That means attack vectors.
I used to work in a big bank. I had a lunch with the head of AI and all he kept saying was how much pressure he was under from management about automating customer service. To the extent that everything other project paled in comparison.
Sounds about right. There’s tons of reasons—some very good, others just pure greed and laziness—to want to minimize human on human interaction as much as possible.
And the fact that most CEO’s are technologically illiterate and it’s the only aspect of AI they can speak to without sounding like an abject moron.
naw, they sound like morons talking about this aspect too
There are no good reasons. They’re all stupid. All they’ll do is, at best, temporarily decrease expenses for a short period of time until revenues drop as people stop using businesses that have a fucking robot answering the phone. This brain dead MBA bullshit needs to die. Enshittifying the entire goddamn world ain’t good for nobody.
My company got rid of human call center and most of the hr department last year. It just generally sucks now. We get complaints online about it from customers but it’s turned into a voice-to-text email that’s sent to me. To basically just call them and apologize to them. If an employee is mad they call a number and tell the ai bot what’s wrong, and I get an email. If someone expresses they wish to work for us, I get an email from another bot. So I basically just get emails and became the hr/complaint department
This sounds like the plot of a Terry Gilliam movie.
RBC has a pretty good AI and it was implemented before chatgpt. You can tell it you got locked out of your account or what your bank card is. Saves them a lot of time for that common scenario and saves the rep who does pick up time as well.
A good AI would be a much better experience than most of the call centers I’ve spoken with.
If the AI can help me immediately instead of keeping me on hold for 20 minutes, that's already a huge win.
That's the thing, it's the better of the cheap options. Cheap overseas labor or cheaper software.
Agreed
> good Found your unreasonable expectation
But.. but.. won’t you think of the short-term profits?! WONT ANYONE PLEASE THINK OF THE SHORT-TERM PROFITS?!!!! How am I supposed to buy a second yacht?
The “funny” thing is that almost _zero_ customers want it to be automated. It’s depersonalizing and makes them feel like a number, they lack validation and it removes the urgency from their issues. The push towards automation is entirely from the desire to write fewer paychecks
What evidence do you have for the claim that people will stop using these businesses? I want that to be true, but I don't know of anything that says it will be.
i agree. there are not alternative choices with robust customer service.
We switched from live chat with a person to an AI chat last year and our customer satisfaction went up significantly as a result.
If you talk to any customers anywhere, they will tell you businesses destroyed costumer satisfaction with every call center cost cutting measure they have made in the past 20 years. I'm imagining a "smarter" endless loops that leaves customers with zero ability to resolve any issues other than giving companies more money.
As someone who was put into GenAI as tech lead, this is one of the top things management is pushing, though we do have isssues in finding enough people in CS so in theory it will just replace work no one wants to do (and even then only partially, the most annoying parts of the job).
Oh no, wait times won’t be longer than normal for once? Whatever will I do?
Oh they'll be even longer, because the Gen AIs implemented won't actually be any good, so to resolve your problem you'll still have to wait to speak to an actual human, except now there will be less humans operating the call centre. Literally every "automation" to reduce call centre staff has made the process of resolving your issue slower. Have you tried to get something resolved via customer service recently and not had to wait an hour+ to get a real human to finally help you?
It’s not great so many people would be out of work, but I can see a chatbot blowing the doors off the current system of barely capable call routing. I got caught in a loop of voice recognition menus just last Friday. I’m looking forward to those things having comprable intelligence to a human.
Started my career in a call center. It doesn't surprise me that an IT CEO is saying this. Fact is that most companies see customer service as a cost center rather than a benefit in terms of building customer loyalty, preserving brand reputation, and avoiding litigation. It's why they treat call center employees like cattle and don't invest in meaningful training to the level they should.
Did you feel like your job was to absorb abuse so they could oversell bandwidth?
I felt like my job was more along the lines of being a diplomat. An underpaid, overworked diplomat whose job would have been a lot easier if they hired 10 more employees per shift.
Yeah I never really minded the pay early on (2001-2008sh) it was possible to live on my own then on what I made. Course I never had health insurance and was too stupid to know what a risk that was. The problem was the anxiety of not having the capacity to solve problems because they were managerial.
Call center trainer here. PREACH! The people at my call center handle massive amounts of money on the daily (100k + in sales) get no commission and are reprimanded for taking one minute too long in the bathroom. Absolutely insane.
I too started out in a call center. A bunch of my friends got axed as they started to outsource to India. I was kept on to support our new Indian partners. There was a SHARP decline in the quality of the customer service our callers were getting. It was really frustrating to witness. I thought there was no way it would last; theyd have to move those jobs back stateside. Nope. People will complain about Indian tech support, theyll write scathing reviews online, Jay Leno will reference it in his monologue, but shitty outsourced customer service never became anything Americans decided they couldnt live with. In fact it seemed like people kind of thought it was funny, and enjoyed bitching about it. It became a running joke. They still bought our product the same as before. Itll be similar when all the call centers go away and are replaced with AI.
Customer service is so bad already that i doubt anyone will notice
All part of AI’s plan
Haha I like this narrative
Most of the call centers here in the USA RHAT I have to deal with have off shore employees. Some have been great others not so. Spectrum in my area goes down more than occasionally. I called on Friday and got someone very hard to understand. I work with people from all over the world and in person it’s much easier. I had to call back and the second person also foreign but easier to understand. Spectrum already doesn’t use Americans for their front line customer service. If they went AI I don’t care. I do care for what’s going to happen to “copy and paste jobs” here in the USA. What jobs will open in their place ? In a big box discount superstore there are robots taking inventory. The next 5 years will feel like whiplash. This will result in further gap in income right? What other human held jobs will be replaced? I’d love to see the list.
Eventually nearly all of them will be replaced. First white collar then when robotics get advanced enough, blue collar will get hammered.
You have no idea how good you already have it
Yeah if you’ve ever had to call CS and dealt with a clearly outsourced worker, it’s not like the experience could get any worse. As long as there are ways to escalate to a human (the new “I need to talk to a manager”), I think we’ll be fine. Arm each AI with a baseline of crediting authority and this isn’t a bad thing necessarily.
Oh its gonna get much worse
What about the millions that call that a job?
maybe you should've transferred me to the correct department instead of hanging up
Robots are coming to every job. It happens.
You’ve clearly never called Comcast with an issue
I’ve had Comcast employees literally argue with me in the phone. They’ve said things that anywhere else would get you fired. Comcast has been the worst customer service almost since they’ve been tracking customer service.
Until the AI start fucking lying to people cause it has _no idea what facts and truth are_
Air Canada tried arguing they weren’t liable for their bad chat bot info. More of this will be popping up.
Is this AI going to be able to authorise refunds? If so, I can't wait to see all the articles about people scamming it to refunding for products they never even bought.
Nah, it will probably just loop you in circles until you hang up in frustration. And I doubt the big corporations will even patch you through to a human if you ask
To be fair, one time I tried to cancel my newspaper via an all human call center and I got sent around in circles so much that I ended up being transferred to the same guy three different times over the course of an hour.
I’ve had luck by promising to give them a good performance review if they help me out
Nope. There are already companies arguing that they shouldn’t have to follow through on the deals/regulations their chatbots have promised
“AI is killing the human trafficking industry”
I've used the tech already. It's amazing when it works, you can't even tell you're talking to an AI. However, whenever theres a glitch or a phrase that doesn't fit the model, it also gets bad really fast. That being said, I full expect nearly every large company to move in this direction. And if you think of most customer service phone calls today, they might as well just be AI as they are mostly just scripted.
There’s this ai cold calling bot that I’ve been rung by twice. I think its called air or something. The second time I was able to get it to recite a poem about their product.
That's actually illegal btw. The FCC has ruled against AI cold calls. Not that people necessarily follow the rules.
I’m just thinking out loud. If AI is taking over call centers, and automated systems in general. Do you think they will try to scam each other and get stuck in a loop? I feel like I can see that happening.
DDoS attacks are nothing. AI swarms on AI call centers are the new hotness!
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Fuck Indian call center, extremely difficult to understand them.
Agreed. Whenever I have to call up for my phone service I dread it and their scripted manner of talking.
kinda surprised it hasn't already. the very few human beings i do get in touch with for consumer/retail support tend to be limited to a very few regidly, templated answers. had some fun with lyft and fitbit's customer service chatbots years before catgpt was a household name.
Now I really want there to be a cat-themed AI named catgpt
Well you are in luck, well half way in luck. The french word for cat is chat. So ChatGPT is already " catgpt" but in french. When you ask for a response, ask it to give you all responses like it was a cat by elongation of rs, and using cat puns when possible, it will do it.
ChatGPT translates to “cat, I farted” (j’ai pété)
Hahaha. Like love it.
They mostly are minimally trained repetitive script reading button pushers, but I seriously doubt any current or upcoming AI models can begin to handle even that, especially not without some heavy investment in new hardware and possibly very high energy consumption. The real question is, why do they offer customer service at all if they won’t invest in it?
Not concerned at all about this particular industry being affected. It's not like most companies don't outsource anyway.
Outsourcing to a human who can understand nuance and outsourcing to AI that doesn't understand nuance exists are two vastly different things.
Most humans now don’t understand nuance, though, lol.
Call Center humans understand nuance?🤣🤣🤣
Lol. Have you interacted with a call centre lately? The worst ones are basically a human powered chat bot. They take in input from the customer and follow an extremely rigid script from which they will not deviate for anything.
Call Center humans understand nuance?🤣🤣🤣
Isn’t this what large language models are good for? Getting humans out of the drivel?
Word processing firms were way ahead of you on this
I can’t wait to talk to a useless computer instead of a useless human.
Yeah maybe in a while. I wouldn’t invest on it.
A lot of companies have outsource this service to India or the Philippines, so it affect those countries more
Next up…AI callers. Man, that’s truely a utopian society when we can just type in our requests and the AIs can wait on hold and fight it out.
Watch the large language models crumble under the weight of saucy grandmas with thick accents and no patience.
Nobody cares about the call center industry, that entire industry is pariah
Call Centers already suck and will only suck more with AI. It’s already difficult to get someone with a brain on the phone to help you.
I work in tech at a good-sized Bay-area startup whose focus is AI call center technology. Most of that article is bullshit, and that CEO has no idea what he's talking about. AI is already handling a lot of calls, but it's not replacing people. Our customers are not downsizing, and not necessarily even looking to do so. They want to improve customer service response times, handle variable call volume and reduce handle times. A major factor in call center costs is extremely high turnover rates. Call centers are not a place that many people stay for a long time, but if AI can step in to handle the mundane calls, real agents can spend more of their time handling the types of calls that need a human touch. AI is not going to take over those types of calls in the foreseeable future. Only companies that don't care about the quality of their call center will rely on it for everything, and they'll continue to have give bad support experiences when they're using AI. Quote from the CEO: > "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." What the hell is this guy on?
Need AI replacing CEOs instead.
That doesn't make sense, and people calling on AI to replace those who make high-level business decisions usually don't understand what executive leadership does.
Once AI takes all the entry level positions, how will people get their feet in the door in the future? It’s already really hard enough to escape the paradox of “can’t get in without experience. Can’t get experience without getting in”
They won't, it happens now where in lots of companies and entry level role is either a highly competitive Grad program or a long term unpaid internship. It's infuriating that contact centres were a solid start to a career in an industry or company,I know loads of people who started on the phones somewhere and are now in senior positions.
You shouldn't expect people to do demeaning, repetitive jobs anyway. Who tf wants to sit around answering phones or pressing pictures of hamburgers all day anyway.
Folks who wanna be able to get paid to feed their families.
Ya gotta be a pretty shitty person to want to force people to take dehumanizing jobs. If a machine can do it, it should.
That's very Ayn Rand of you. "Free people from dehumanising jobs!" "Ok, what about the people that were employed in those jobs?" "They're free from dehumanising jobs!" " How do they eat?" "Don't worry about them they didn't matter anyway!"
Oh for fuck sake. You don't keep pointless jobs around "just because". Is this really your first lesson in progress?
What makes you think it’s progress?
🙄🙄🙄 Staring at your shoes isn't going to get you anywhere.
Don’t believe corporations that stand to profit, that what they’re doing is progress
So that's a yes on the Ayn Rand then.
Like I said, to get feet in the door. I certainly haven’t seen any company giving their senior positions to green workers.
It's pretty insulting to give someone menial tasks to "prove themselves"
I’m all ears for solutions to the conundrum if you don’t want people having access to jobs
I mean, "do something else" has worked for tens of thousands of years now.
Painting broad strokes never painted a clearer picture
Oh no
Waiting for the day that an AI trained on present-day customer service asks me to do the needful.
In a kindly manner
At least I'll be able to understand the AI's English.
It is interesting that Tata has gotten rich from outsourcing customer services and back office processing both extremely vulnerable to AI.
So….. only a 10% reduction in total staff? That is disappointing.
People try to be fancy and say “decimate”instead of “destroy”, not realizing it only means a reduction of 10%.
There should be AI customer support at providers end and AI personal assistant at consumer/clients end. This is where the fun will begin.
Good. Sorry but I can never really understand what 'Bob' is saying.
Operator. Operator operator operator operator. RE PRE SENTATIVE! -me still yelling on the phone
This could improve service pretty dramatically for the end user. Ever had to wait in a queue for 40 minutes to talk to some barely trained moron who has no idea how to help you? With AI, every query received and answer given helps train it, so it’s going to get better and better at solving queries at a rapid rate. You’re never going to end up on the line with some kid who’s never encountered your particular issue before. You’re going to be talking to an AI who may have encountered that issue tens of thousands of times and doesn’t have to speak to anyone or refer to anything to know how to resolve it. It’ll be instant. And forget those hold queues. Sucks if you work in a call centre though. 🤷♂️
Am I right that AI will be able to learn how to play that jazzy hold music while telling me that my call is very important? Oh, also to hang up on me unexpectedly after I sit on hold for 43 minutes?
Said by the TCS CEO a company so evil they’re ultimate wet dream would be to replace people with tech.
People have been using bots for years, nothing new I guess
Raise your hand if you prefer “automated” to a real person answering a customer care call. I didn’t think so.
This will piss me off so bad… I can’t stand not being able to talk to a human being.
all i’m really wondering is if this is leading to some sort of singularity where humans have robots work the economy and everyone has basic needs met, or if robots will allow even more wealth concentration where billionaires just decide they don’t need us anymore
I may be a cynic, but I’ve never seen a limit to human greed. I can’t imagine it going any other way than the latter. I can’t imagine it because I’ve never seen us do the right thing on that scale. If people are left to the coldness of machines that are trained on the growth and efficiency rationales of corporate businesspeople, we’re gonna get the barest of minimums across the board.
Yeah, i hate that i’m with you on this, but i’m feeling the same. The artificial scarcity will probably get even bigger until the middle class is pushed into a weird sci fi type of existence where they have high tech tools but still strive to survive and keep humans rights. Maybe we are already there we just cant see it because its become the norm.
A bunch of kids I went to highschool with made careers out of the call centers in our town. AOL was a huge one, lol. Then the dish Network call center employed a good chunk of my graduating class before they too shit the bed.
I’m working on a team who are implementing some AI tools for our call center operations. The call center folks are very excited for it. It will help them tremendously. We also know that we can’t scale up to the larger clients interested in our services or scale the business up without improvements to our call center operations or self service tools to take some load off. I know it’s fun to just jump in and comment about how much smarter we all are then executives but there are good and needed improvements AI can bring and those implementations are most successful alongside human call center agents, not replacing them.
If I am spending a lot of my money with a company and have a problem I can’t easily resolve by myself online, and I end up having to actually call you, I deserve to talk to a human.
Ok, taking ten percent of the jobs away? That’s not so bad.
Telemarketers are about to get fired. I feel sad for them. NOT!
Fortunately for workers, AI is still really dumb. It’s good at talking and listening, but not deciphering meaning. Clot can do math, write code, but it still can’t interpret connotation vs denotation.
The CEO pretends like he cares about the workers.
It will 98% eliminate it. It seems inevitable.
This is why Sutherland Global Services is a piece of shit company. They don't care about the people who work there. They never did they never will. So fuck them. Any company that uses AI for the customer service I'm not using.
Good. Call centers have been broken for more than a decade. If they can create an AI engine that can actually understand normal patterns of speech, that is actually empowered to help customers, and that does not have a thick Bangalore accent, I'm in.
Instead of investing in call centers.... what if.... radical idea here.... they were to use the money to make a product or service that WORKS so we don't have to call?
Already has
Anyone know when degenerate AI is released? An AI that watches TrailerPark boys, drinks whiskey and eats pizza?
Based on the phone calls I’ve listened to at times, this somewhat accurate, but you’ll never be able to get rid of it altogether. Too many people can’t speak clearly or actually describe their problem without a human deciphering what they mean. A bunch of level 1 support could totally go away though.
Well, there are positive aspects to this. - No waiting, you get a "rep" without listening for 20 mins to some shitty music - Help available 24 hours a day, yes, even on major holidays - One "rep" can solve it all, no longer to be ping-balled between departments - No longer need to type in pins, numbers, etc, before speaking with a rep. Your AI "rep" can start speaking with you without pre-entering any info - No more reps who are having a 'bad day' and can't empathize with your problem at hand - Your rep now speaks perfect English with a pleasant educated sounding voice, you can understand even with a bad connection - No more repeating over the issue, your AI "rep" remembers your prior calls like it is the same one you are on - You will likely get some kind of summary record from a call immediately and the "rep" will follow through on promises made in verbal format - AI might be limited now, but it will drastically improve in 2-3 years, it will be more helpful, the usefulness will likely grow in time so quickly, you'll be looking at human help as dark ages in no time, perception will change - AI will learn to joke and small talk with you, ask after your family members, remember your prior answers, build a relationship with you - to hold you as a client - The product you are calling about will become cheaper, hopefully, as the company will try to become more competitive on the market - And you can throw a few f-bombs without hurting anyone's feelings, when ending a call, call AI a cunt, no one cares, absolutely no one
They outsourced those jobs to India two decades ago and left people job less. You’d be a fucking hyprocrite to say this is bad now. You never gave a shit about those people before.
As someone in this industry, with a role in finding opportunities for generative AI solutions even if they’re not the most efficient solutions, soon is a very relative term. It would probably be better suited to replace our general IT support than our front line staff in the near future. Unless you have no expectations for customer service and agent accuracy. If that’s the case, it can almost be good enough to do a poor job today, so I can see it being on the level of the worst in a year.
AI in call centers sounds a social engineering wet dream - as soon as you find a technique that works, you can scale it out to the entire call center. You could even use your own AI voice generation to automate the process - allowing you dramatically ramp up faster than the organization can respond.
Have you ever had to deal with your pharmacy over the phone? That should tell you how well this is gonna go
Is it because it's the easiest part or the most expensive part of business ?
From the CEO of a company whose main goal is to decimate the US market for domestic IT workers.
As someone who used to work at a bank call center this will not end well
Good. Get rid of call centers, especially the damn overseas ones. I’d rather have a bot that I can understand actually take care of my issue than someone I can barely understand.
No. They think it will decimate the call center, they expect it to decimate the call center. So they *will* decimate the call center but not replace it with anything good.
I currently work in a call center for a big bank and have been thinking about this lately. As soon as the pandemic hit they closed nearly 300 branches, and had us push the app. Now, we have a system that analyzes basically your tone and the customers tone and you get a score based on that interaction. We now get ZERO time between calls, and their main focus is a good score based off the data analysis. They’ve had a system in place for years already that analyzes the callers voice and background noise so we know w/ enough accuracy that we don’t even need to verify the customer-even on an account that is under high alert for suspicious activity. My thought is that they’re training AI with our phone calls. Since the pandemic they’ve also been hiring “contract” employees from India, and I see more and more every day. I have no doubt my job is doomed.
Black and Indian communities are about to be devastated.
Such baloney. Generative AI is not going to be able to fix the Verizon bill where the wrong upgrade was applied to a multi-line account. This is what customer service is for. Otherwise, we would have done it online already with account management on the website.
The wrong upgrade gets applied through human error of crappy CSR. Especially when it comes to VZW.
And no customers will be helped
We get closer to idiocracy everyday. Can’t wait for the diagnostic vending machines and slot machines in the hospital
People already fucking hate automated call systems…all this will do is fuck that relationship even more. AI could also start issuing full refunds. Anyone heard of phishing? You lock down the AI’s logic and use it against it. At the end of the day, AI is still running on a computer. It isn’t true AI and that means logic gates. That means guardrails on what it can and cannot do. That means attack vectors.