AI is already so much better than 99% of customer support employees.

It also improves brand reputation by actually paying attention to what customers are saying and responding in a timely manner, with expert-level knowledge, unlike typical customer service reps.

I've used LLMs to help me fix Windows issues using pretty advanced methods, that MS employees would have just told me to either re-install Windows or send them the laptop and pay $hundreds.

As someone who was recently screwed over by LLM CSR, I'd respectfully disagree. Amazon replaced their offshore humans with LLMs recently. They put the "subscribe to Prime" button on the right-hand side of the screen when you go to checkout. It's a one-click subscription. I accidentally clicked it a few days ago.

I immediately hop on customer service chat to ask for a refund. I was surprised to be talking to an LLM rather than a human, but go ahead and explain what happened and state I want the transaction for the subscription canceled. It offers to cancel the subscription at the end of the 30-day subscription. I decline, noting I want a refund for the subscription I didn't intend to take. It repeats it can cancel the subscription at the end of 30-day subscription. I ask for human. It repeats. I ask for human again. It repeats. I disconnect.

Amazon knows what it's doing.

I don't want AI customer support. I want open documentation so I can ask AI if I want or ask human support if it's not resolvable with available documentation

All my interactions with any AI support so far is repeatedly saying "call human" until it calls human

> AI is already so much better than 99% of customer support employees.

99% seems like a pulled-out-of-your-butt number and hyperbolic, but, yes, there's clearly a non-trivial percentage of customer support that's absolutely terrible.

Please keep in mind, though, that a lot of customer support by monopolies is intended to be terrible.

AI seems like a dream for some of these companies to offer even worse customer service, though.

Where customer support is actually important or it's a competitive market, you tend to have relatively decent customer support - for example, my bank's support is far from perfect, but it's leaps and bounds better than AT&T or Comcast.

This is great but most customer support is actually designed as a “speed bump” for customers.

Cancel account- have them call someone.

Withdraw too much - make it a phone call.

Change their last name? - that would overwhelm our software, let’s have our operator do that after they call in.

Etc.

Except AI support agents are only using content that is already available in support knowledge bases, making the entire exercise futile and redundant. But sure, they're eloquent while wasting your time.

When asking customers how well they were helped by the customer support system (via CSAT score), I've found industry-standard AI support agents will generally perform worse than a well-trained human support team. AI agents are fine at handling some simple queries, e.g. basic product and order informatino, but support issues are often biased towards high complexity, because otherwise they could solve it in a more automated. I'm sure it depends on the industry, and whether the customer's issue is truly novel.

Improves brand reputation? I don't think I've seen a single case where someone is glad to talk to an LLM/chat bot instead of an actual person. Personally, I think less of any company that uses them. I've never seen one be actually useful, and they seem to only really regurgitate links to FAQ pages or give the most generic answers possible while I fight to get a customer service number so I can actually solve the problem at hand.

It isn’t empowered to do anything you can’t already do in the UI, so it is useless to me.

Perhaps there is a group that isn’t served by legacy ui discovery methods and it’s great for them, but 100% of chat bots I’ve interacted with have damaged brand reputation for me.

> AI is already so much better than 99% of customer support employees.

i have yet to experience this. unfortunately i fear it's the best i can hope for, and i worry for those in support positions.

MS customer service is perhaps the lowest bar available. One look at their tech support forums tells you that most of what they post is canned garbage that is no help to anyone.

AI is not better than a good customer service team, or even an above-average one. It is better than a broken customer service team, however. As others have noted, 99% is hyperbolic BS.