I'm really not looking forward to the future where every business has chatbot support.
They are already quite common and frustrating, but at least they realize it doesn't even understand the question half the time so there is a human escape hatch.
"Computer says no" is here.
Edit: so I'm not just negative and off topic, the article looks pretty good, kudos to the author. The engineering is cool, I just don't like the practical usage.
TBH, 99% of the clients never read the documentation, the faq, nor they search in google. Lazy users are wasting time and if a chatbot can filter a significant percent of them, then it would be a net gain for humanity. chatbots are not a silver bullet, but they can kill lots of unnecessary noise. all that we need is something that can answer basic questions asked by average users in a specific domain.
You say lazy users but if I have to google something that is the business who is at fault. Example: A business like Shopify has a large community, FAQ, half a dozen different documentation sites for everything, multiple blogs, and probably other things out there, but I still have to google to find the right place and right answer. This is on a platform I've used for 13 years but I either forget something or they add something new, or they've changed an API, etc.
So you know what the fastest way is sometimes? Shooting off a support ticket so I don't have to be the one spending my time searching for the answer.
I don't know if there's a perfect solution to all of that but IMO there's certainly an issue if I have to google for information for the business site that I'm on. Chatbot, universal search, better UX, a source of truth, something... What I do know is 20 different subdomains with 20 different UXs and 20 different searches isn't good for the business or the user.
Bad for you and Shopify, but some organizations have a single place of documentation and users still fail to bother checking it. If something is not immediately obvious for them on the ui, they automatically want a phone call with tech support. add to it a small company with a small team of support staff and it turns into an unfair battle. so, every mechanism to resolve the user's issue before you need to involve a human is a tool to make everyone happy and maximally productive.
Usually I just know which issues will be or not be in company documentation. I’ve never been wrong before, since every single time I reached out to support they needed to take action that could not be competed by a customer alone. One example is how poorly many SaaS handle conversion from single to team accounts. Usually they end up having to create an entirely different account and make admin changes so I can reuse the email.
> some organizations have a single place of documentation and users still fail to bother checking it
It depends on the size is the org in question, but at some point docs existing and being indexed is still not enough to find them. On the extreme side of that, AWS has docs for pretty much everything - yet I often fail to find the right page, simply because there's too much content and there's lots of pages talking about related things but not answering my question.
Sometimes it's missing docs, sometimes it's lack of searching, sometimes the most viable path to the answer is through support. (Amazon has TAMs for that purpose)
> add to it a small company with a small team of support staff and it turns into an unfair battle
Totally agree and I feel for any any support staff, small or large, as it is unfair. I guess my point is insanely large, highly profitable organizations probably have a UX problem along with a much larger greed problem. No one should be stuck chatbotting or having non-existent support if they are a paying customer with Google.
The world is not big organizations only and ai chatbots are not substitute for proper tech support. Chatbots are the self help lane enabling the tech support to concentrate on the tickets about real issues.
I also don‘t think a customer facing chat bot brings much value, but an internal, employee only chat bot could be really useful, depending on the organzization of course. The company in my last position was a rather big one with an insanely huge Confluence instance. I‘ve spent (wasted) so much time searching information there. Having a chat bot, trained on all that information, would‘ve been really useful, I think.
It could be useful in a small company if you tie it in to how your software works with other software.
Even for things like support case generation for customers would be good... the customer interacts with the AI generating the ticket and gets the simple things like what you're running on and a more drilled down issue of the problem.
I get so many "I have problem, help" tickets with no information at all.
If anything, I hope Atlassian is looking into some AI capabilities for precisely this purpose. I also find their search feature lacking when dealing with a huge knowledge base, and perhaps a bot would improve things.
AI chatbots could be useful at support if they can fix the code for customers and submit a pull request to the developers. No more JRA-9 issue opened for 10 years.
> I'm really not looking forward to the future where every business has chatbot support. They are already quite common and frustrating.
To be honest, I've had some good experience with some of them.
Amazon's comes to mind. I've been a customer for a long time, and I was shipped a faulty computer peripheral recently.
I briefly explained what the issue was to the chatbot and got an immediate response that a new order had been placed, that I should just keep what they originally sent me, there was no charge and it would be sent out priority.
And that was it. It arrived the next day and it worked fine.
Granted, it knew I was a long-time customer who has already spent a lot of money with them, but this was about as painless an experience as I can imagine. It sure beat clicking through multiple web pages of dialog options.
I think you're conflating a good policy with good UX. I don't think the chat bot experience is much better than a nice "the product I received didn't work" form with a button on the order page.
Would it be worse CX if I had to click a button labeled "this didn't work" on my order, and they shipped me a new one? I think it would be strictly better than trying to discover how to do that with language.
Sorry, I was too terse—I was just observing that it was a combination of policy and UX that combined to create a good CX. You’re right that it’s not necessarily the chat UX that led to the good experience, but it also was not purely policy.
We have various "BIO" certified food. Maybe it is time for "human" certified companies. I'll pay more for my bank account if I can resolve problems with a human.
That is an interesting idea, one that I agree with. However, the issue that could arise is the premium companies could potentially change for "human support". It could become something only the wealthy could afford. While I don't believe that's likely, it's not in the realm of impossibility.
You shouldn't have to do that. Sure, customer support costs a lot of money if done properly but so does executive compensation. Customer support is usually the lowest paid and suffers the most abuse, but because of the decades of skimming from the top customers (and support) lose out.
Google just had a net income for the quarter of $18B. Why do we accept the tepid to non-existent support of these companies? How much support does $1B cover?
Depends where the support is and what level it is. With enterprise level support, not as far as you would think.
'Cheap' support is typically terrible to the point of being worse than a chatbot, generally due to the terrible pay and conditions. As support engineers get good they generally move to higher paying jobs leaving a dead sea effect at the lower pay scales.
The biggest danger of AI is not that it becomes autonomous and escapes the hatch, it’s that humans put it everywhere in charge.
“Sorry judge, my whole plead was nonsense and I quoted law articles that didn’t even exist, but that’s just because I used ChatGPT” — actual lawyer who wasn’t even disbarred.
All current chatbots that I've dealt with have been terrible reimplementations of phone menus in text, completely unable to handle even a basic freeform question. Maybe the new wave based on LLMs will be significantly better, but I'm not holding out too much hope. Already with phone menus we get railroaded down paths convenient for the controlling entity, rather than being able to engage in a good-faith discussion.
The problem is they are unlikely to let the bot really do anything I can't already do on the website - ask for refund, correct payment etc. Otherwise it would be easy to trick the bot and abuse it.
Without human you just get a powerless regurgitation of FAQ and links that can't help in situations they didn't anticipate.
The bot can get the ticket setup to the point the human takes over.
In support calls the confused user rarely has all the information they need to present to the person solving/finalizing the transaction and a bot can help reduce the human time needed.
I am looking forward to it, but with different models that I don't think are quite there yet.
We have been trialing this with our support team for awhile and a lot of higher execs were ready to sign off and dump rather large sums on some models, but eventually we were able to convince them to delay; the bots are just too prone to convincing but wrong answers, and our buy-in from clients is way too polarized: either they uncritically believe the bot or they are overly skeptical of the bot.
the tech is very cool, but I don't think that the technology or humans are at a place yet where it's ready for full on use outside of very controlled situations. I could see it being very useful as an addition to search fields or to maybe monitor the user's search inputs/actions and based on what the user is looking up, show some context-aware prompts.
What I'd really like to see is a bot that is extremely skeptical and shows the user its skepticism in an unambiguous manner; classify the data and make an internal flag where if the bot's skepticism is above a certain threshold, it finds knowledge holders it's aware of to work through the bot's skepticism and never act on the information until the bot has lowered the skepticism value after checking.
right now my experience with the bots I've played with is that they either just shut down the conversation without advancing it or giving the user paths for research forward, or the bot confidently just pumps out any answer it makes that fits as a response for the given query, and I think we need the bots to show skepticism and explain to the user what this skepticism means. (i.e., the user should be alerted that the bot isn't confident on an answer, why the bot isn't confident, alternatives that the bot understands to be equally relevant or worth consideration.
it can still be polite, but the bots need to share when they're out of their league and work to correct it; I think people will actually appreciate it, and the bots are well suited to this position because they have no emotional stake in the game, so users can get as upset as they want that they don't have immediate disagreement, the bot won't change its position just because the user is upset.
They are already quite common and frustrating, but at least they realize it doesn't even understand the question half the time so there is a human escape hatch.
"Computer says no" is here.
Edit: so I'm not just negative and off topic, the article looks pretty good, kudos to the author. The engineering is cool, I just don't like the practical usage.