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...
  • The Dark Lord ☑️@lemmy.caEnglish
    754·
    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.worksEnglish
      621·
      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.eeEnglish
        3·
        6 months ago

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

    • makingStuffForFun@lemmy.mlEnglish
      111·
      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.caEnglish
        8·
        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.worksEnglish
      157·
      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.caEnglish
        2·
        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.worksEnglish
          3·
          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.worksEnglish
          2·
          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.zipEnglish
      4·
      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.worldEnglish
      3·
      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.worksEnglish
      2·
      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.worldEnglish
      11·
      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.

    • deafboy@lemmy.worldEnglish
      91·
      6 months ago

      Well, the world is your oyster… Can’t wait for yout chief automated officer.

      edit: There was a similar hype back in the blockchain era, where people were trying to build decentralized organizations by making all the shareholders directly vote on every decision. Let’s just say this model wasn’t especially successful except for very rare circumstances.

  • teamevil@lemmy.worldEnglish
    30·
    6 months ago

    AI: what do you need

    Me: Talk to a human

    AI: okay, so I can help get the right help what specifically do you need?

    Me: to talk to a human

    ad infinitum

  • realitista@lemm.eeEnglish
    281·
    6 months ago

    I work for the largest contact center tech firm, and I’m sure it won’t be this year. There are major issues to be solved. The companies that acted first had cars sold for $1, entirely new offers made up that they had to honor, and their bots made poems full of swear words about how shitty their companies were. I’m not sure how long it will take for gen ai to take over but some major issues need to be solved first and I don’t see much progress being made on those.

  • baatliwala@lemmy.worldEnglish
    27·
    6 months ago

    Extremely ironical that they used an AI generated pie chart in the article that couldn’t even distinguish the colours between choices

    • Dark Arc@social.packetloss.ggEnglish
      5·
      6 months ago

      As a colorblind person … this is a teachable moment for what we go through with all kinds of charts and video games lol

      (and yes, it’s this bad, and yes it happens A LOT)

  • ikidd@lemmy.worldEnglish
    25·
    6 months ago

    Will the AI not hang up on me when I ask it a question that’s going to take a long time to resolve and fuck up it’s service metrics?

    I’ve gone through like 3 service reps in a single problem because the call mysteriously drops after I outline the issue. “Could you hold please?” — click

    • beefbot@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      15·
      6 months ago

      I promise you 1) this real-world event will fail to be scrubbed from the training data & 2) it will be regurgitated as a valid event that saves the company money.

      So yes. That will happen again :/

  • palordrolap@kbin.social
    251·
    6 months ago

    There are already stories about companies being sued because their AI gave advice that caused the customer to act in a manner detrimental to themselves. (Something about 'plane flight refunds being available if I remember correctly).

    Then when they contacted the company to complain (perhaps get the promised refund), they were told that there was no such policy at their company. The customer had screenshots. The AI had wholesale hallucinated a policy.

    We all know how this is going to go. AI left, right and centre until it costs companies more in AI hallucination lawsuits than it does to employ people to do it.

    And all the while they’ll be bribing lobbying government representatives to make AI hallucination lawsuits not a thing. Or less of a thing.

    • asdfasdfasdf@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      6 months ago

      On the other hand, are you implying that human call center workers are accurate with what they tell customers and that when they make mistakes the companies will own up to them and honor them?

      • zbyte64@awful.systemsEnglish
        21·
        6 months ago

        I mean that’s generally how it is now. If a rep lied to me then you better believe I’m talking to the manager and going to extract some concession. The difference is you can hold a rep accountable, dunno how you do that with AI

  • manuallybreathing@lemmy.mlEnglish
    22·
    6 months ago

    I will not be shedding a tear if people no longer have to work in such a soul crushing menial job. Fuck around and findout what happens millions of people lose their jobs all at once.

    but anyway this is just some more ai hype stock manipulation shit.

    • MajinBlayze@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      6 months ago

      At least we’ve all got reasonable unemployment measures to make sure these people are able to transition to better work.

  • Treczoks@lemmy.worldEnglish
    21·
    6 months ago

    First of all, it will make cold calling way, way worse. Time to ramp up restrictions, fines and other penalties for that kind of stuff.

    When it comes to tech support call centers, some may actually improve. Not because the technology is so superior, but just because the current support simply sucks, and any change would be an improvement. And then they must actually work, i.e. solve the customers problems. On top of that, there is that case where an AI call center made expensive promises (IIRC if promised a car for $1 or something like that), and the judge made the company uphold this deal.