• The Dark Lord ☑️@lemmy.ca
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    6 months ago

    Call centres exist because people can’t get the help they need by searching. Take away call centres, and you’re just making it more difficult for customers.

    • Deceptichum@sh.itjust.works
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      6 months ago

      Uhh they’ve all been outsourced to India for ages now, and they’re effectively useless. You’ll get someone who’s worse than an AI at understanding what you’re asking and cannot deviate from a scrip because they have no training.

      I haven’t used one in over a decade, if I have an issue it’s going as an email or a comment on social media.

      • realitista@lemm.ee
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        6 months ago

        Unless you are an absolute monopoly, there is a point you can cross where your customers just leave.

    • makingStuffForFun@lemmy.ml
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      6 months ago

      We handle support in our company as part of our day to day. By and large the bulk of support is people simply leaning on us, rather than relying on common sense, or using the docs. Only a small percent is what would be considered essential.

      However, each industry is different. This is just ours.

      Generative AI could easily help the bulk of our support load.

      • Funderpants @lemmy.ca
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        6 months ago

        We’re experimenting with retrieval augmented generation for early inquiries right now. We get hundreds of inquiries that could be answered by looking at the website/docs and Q&A models with extractive or abstract approaches, or newer generative approaches are good at handling them.

        Looked at four models last week, 2 vendors and 2 open source solutions, it’s very promising. Very high accuracy with extractive approaches to simple queries, an email answering bot that links to our live website, along with an offer to talk to a real person could help us out a lot.

    • Aurenkin@sh.itjust.works
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      6 months ago

      You’d be surprised how often we can automate a customers enquiry with ML (not even generative AI). Humans are still there as a fallback, but it’s a way better experience to give instant help to the person if possible and then put them into the queue if they have a more complicated problem. Searching is not really in the same context as automating customer queries, although I guess it could depend on the domain to an extent.

      • stealth_cookies@lemmy.ca
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        6 months ago

        If a request is simple and common enough that the request can be automated, then it is most likely something that I’m already pissed off about having to call in about since it should have been a feature on the company’s website.

        • VirtualOdour@sh.itjust.works
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          6 months ago

          Yes but how often do you call? People like us make up like 1% of their calls, 90% come from people asking ‘how do I download the Google?’ or ‘I saved a picture of my cat where did it go?’ and 9% is people with general questions they could have found online but they didn’t want to get into it.

        • Aurenkin@sh.itjust.works
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          6 months ago

          We use a home grown classification model for our customer facing stuff. There are some applications of LLMs we are using a SaaS for as it’s quick to get going but we are also working on fine tuning an open source model as well so we’ll see what ends up working better in terms of cost vs performance. That’s not going to be customer facing though, we don’t serve any generated text to customers.

    • rottingleaf@lemmy.zip
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      6 months ago

      Oh, I’ve been called by my cell operator today. Realized it’s a bot when it offered to upgrade my plan because I’ve used more than half of it. It’s 28th of this month FFS! I asked whether that’s what they mean and why would I need that, it just repeated in the same voice.

    • phoneymouse@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      I always love how they make you go through a labrinythian menu before you get to a human as if I hadn’t already exhausted all options to help myself.

    • Imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.works
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      6 months ago

      Imaking it more difficult is what I am 100% certain that’s what most companies I’ve had to deal with are trying to do. They will love this.

    • AA5B@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      Remember back in the early days of the internet, when FAQs had frequently asked questions, and were updated in response to calls? Pepperidge farms remembers.