Experts divided on whether a new wave of call centre automation will make for better jobs for people, or merely throw millions out of work

Business owner ‘hires’ ChatGPT for customer service, then fires the humans::Experts divided on whether a new wave of call centre automation will make for better jobs for people, or merely throw millions out of work

  • theluddite@lemmy.mlEnglish
    25·
    1 year ago

    The article only slightly touched on this, but the incoming LLM customer service chatbots are going to absolutely fucking suck, just like outsourcing all the call centers made customer service actually a lot worse, not because people farther away are worse at customer service or anything, but because companies created rigid systems and scripts to remove any agency from its agents. It’s now common for these outsourced call centers to have an initial layer of absolutely useless positions who are only allowed to do a few things, and then they have to escalate to a “supervisor,” who is clearly just an agent with slightly more privileges, and this continues recursively forever. All this does is make the call last forever, but hey, they save some money, and customers like you and me are forced to spend an hour plus on the phone any time we have a problem with any large company.

    Capitalist job replacement isn’t a one-for-one. So long as it makes more profits to do it, they will, even if it makes the service suck. When I have a problem, I need a person with some understanding and agency to resolve it on the other end. LLMs don’t know anything. Even a semi-fluent person with no admin privileges is so much more useful than an LLM. These companies are going to fire all these workers and make customer service an absolute fucking nightmare.

    tl;dr capitalism uses computers backwards

      • GreyBeard@lemmy.oneEnglish
        3·
        1 year ago

        I’m a fan of doing business locally for this reason. People tend to treat you better when they know if they piss someone off enough that person could take a baseball bat to their car. Joking aside, small local companies tend to care about reputation. You are 1 of 1,000, not 1,000,000. Your money constitutes a significant portion of their profits. Unfortunately, it seems like every day there are less small businesses to do business with.

      • theluddite@lemmy.mlEnglish
        2·
        1 year ago

        And CEOs must make themselves personally available to angry customers for a minimum number of hours per week.

    • Nommer@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      I had to pay a small medical bill once and everytime I called it would take me to an answering machine after 2 or 3 minutes. They would call back after 1 or 2 hours and by that time I’m usually at work so I couldn’t answer my phone since I’m driving. I just ended up giving up and stopped trying to pay it. IDK what happened to it.

      • theluddite@lemmy.mlEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        Even if that’s a real demo, I still have two thoughts.

        First, the technical capacity of it has nothing to do with our user experience. Indian people are just as good at delivering customer service as Americans are, yet when we outsource customer service, we make it worse.

        Second, even in that demo, the chat bot didn’t do anything. I very rarely call customer service for technical support. When I call, I normally need specific answers to me, or actions from the company, like a flight change, or an explanation for a charge I don’t understand, or to coordinate warrantied repairs on something I just bought, etc. Notice that all the information the chatbot gave was general-purpose, googlable stuff. Companies aren’t going to let their chatbots change your flight for you or whatever. What’s going to happen is we’re going to have to deal with an LLM that can’t actually resolve our problems, and convince it to go fetch a human.