It's always interesting seeing how HN reacts to AI CX (as someone who works in this space). Yes, the tech savvy crowd loves to say how they always ask for a human and love old school phone trees

in reality 50-80% of callers come in with easily answerable questions because they don't know how to nav the website and prefer to ask in natural language

The vast majority of callers call in to resolve their issue, and most don't care if they are speaking to a bot because they just want their issue fixed. Agents (if implemented well) are an order of magnitude more effective at resolving issues compared to a call centre worker who is reading off a script and churn within 9 months

There's also the 2nd order effs of making CX cheap. before, there is the perverse incentive of companies trying to keep you off support because each call costs them way more than the value they get. if your cost per call drops 100x you can invest in turning a cost centre into a revenue driver (+ a better experience)

▲ toraway 34 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

  > Agents (if implemented well) are an order of magnitude more effective at resolving issues compared to a call centre worker who is reading off a script and churn within 9 months

For this to be true, the agent needs to actually be given the means to solve the problem, otherwise an "agent" is just a glorified help page that wastes your time.

But it seems like companies don't want to do this part, possibly because of fears that someone will trick the agent into giving them a refund or something. Or because the actual goal is to optimize for fewer costly refunds/cancellations/policy exceptions etc.

So for whatever reason, they stay stuck in that useless local maxima while simultaneously making traditional help increasingly difficult to get ahold of when needed for an overall net worse experience as a customer.

	▲	mandeepj 19 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> possibly because of fears that someone will trick the agent into giving them a refund or something. Refunds could require approval. And, it could not be just the agent's sole decision.

▲ jjmarr an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

SWEs get paid to get good at reading documentation on processes. I think HN is biased since we'll only escalate once documentation can't help us.

I'm also bullish because AI coding agents give up easily if my problem is complicated.

I think it'll be easier to convince an AI to transfer me to level 2 support than a human.

	▲	calvinmorrison 20 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		[dead]

▲ insane_dreamer 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I have yet to encounter an AI agent that was able to handle my support questions adequately. I always end up having to get a human (which is becoming increasingly difficult or virtually impossible).

I'm sure AI Support Agents will be implemented better, but so far in my experience, the humans I connect to far outperform the AI agents.

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ej88 an hour ago | parent [-]

that's fair, most implementations in the industry are in the early stages and implementing a full powered agent with access to all the tools it needs is hard (very political as you can imagine). i hope over the next year you notice them getting better!

	▲	nubg an hour ago \| parent [-]
		thanks for your insights, however, citation needed that they will get better

▲ tardedmeme 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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