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...
  • Treczoks@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    3 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.

  • MakePorkGreatAgain@lemmy.basedcount.comEnglish
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    3 months ago

    really hope so - my work’s ServiceDesk is based in India and they’re barely functional - nothing gets fixed until the problem gets passed to an American IT person.

  • realitista@lemm.eeEnglish
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    3 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.

  • Buttons@programming.devEnglish
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    3 months ago

    It’s been a couple decades since I worked in a call center (tech support).

    Are they still dominated by shitty ticketing systems that employees are expected to fill out while being on the call? I don’t know if that was just an oddity of the call center I worked for or not. If I didn’t fill out a ticket correctly we wouldn’t get paid for the tech support, so management would get real upset if you didn’t fill out a ticket correctly. There were like 400 fields to fill out in a ticket and you had to fill out about 15 of them just right; fill out one too many, or one too few, or the wrong one and management is upset.

    Honestly, language models would do better filling out those tickets than they would handling the call. If an AI can’t fill out the ticket, how can it solve an actual problem? It would sure make life for the call center employees better if all they had to do was talk instead of managing a bunch of tickets and paperwork using shitty internal apps. But who am I kidding. They’ll probably find a way to make life worse for the customers and the call center employees and they’ll make a profit, because that’s how free markets work, right? Whoever makes life worse for everyone prospers.

    • Kuma@lemmy.worldEnglish
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      3 months ago

      I am with you. We should use the ai as a tool to automate or remove things that is frustrating or in the way of the actual goal to help the customers. Plus I don’t think any model is good enough (yet) to act as tech support (they can use open ai if it was enough). I think ai is great as a tool tho. For example you can use it to go through a lot of documents of products, policies, other tickets and so on so the tech support person can find the relevant information faster. We can also use ai to create summerise of the call or take notes and so on. A lot of great potential to make everyone happier but I don’t believe in replacing actual ppl.

  • palordrolap@kbin.social
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    3 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
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      3 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
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        3 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

    • VirtualOdour@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
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      3 months ago

      But also first language information systems are a real problem in India especially with government services. These tools are gong to make it much easier to provide vital services and connect people to the appropriate services.

  • node815@lemmy.worldEnglish
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    3 months ago

    In one way, I’m happy this is happening, in another way, I’m not - I’ve given well over 2 decades of my life to the call center way of living. Let me give you a sneak peak into what really happens in the daily life of a call center worker.

    • You live by the time on your telephone, it’s your punch in and punch out system in most centers. Don’t clock in more than 8 or 15 or whatever insane metrics they set past your clock in time else you will be considered tardy. This includes all breaks and clocking out.

    • If you are a first contact person and taking phone orders, your ‘talk time’ is measured. Anything more than the standardized 5 or 6 minutes is considered excessive and they tell you to move the calls along faster.
      If you are customer service, your talk time is loosened but you are also the first and last contact the customer should have for the issue.

    • Your phone calls are monitored and/or recorded (For Real!). If you are like me and hate to your your voice, woe be it to you when they play back your last call or two so you can hear yourself talking to the customer. If not recorded, then it is up to the monitoring person to be nice. You are then told what you need to do to speed up your talk time, or increase sales etc…

    Telemarketing

    Oh dear God, this is a life sucker and has the highest turnover on jobs. You quickly learn more about human nature in an odd sense. The sheer pressure on booking that next sale is insanely high and if you don’t meet the sales minimums for the day or even hour, you are sent home without pay. I worked for a company which sold HR Manual trials, I was never more relieved and happy to be fired when I was for not making the per-requisite sales quotas for the half day.

    TIPS

    I don’t think I’ve encountered a single call center rep in my years of service where a CSR decided that today, they would be a jerk. All we ever want to do is get through the day and earn our wages and go home.

    One thing I will say with confidence, is everyone you work with has something in common, you aren’t there necessarily because you enjoy it, you are there because it puts food on the table and beats living off of unemployment benefits. It’s a thankless job.

    If you receive great service from a call center rep (CSR) and are happy, politely ask to speak with their supervisor and when you do, be sure to leave them a good review. It doesn’t always help to do this after a bad call, but sometimes rebounding to a new agent by calling the company back and asking for a supervisor will make a big difference if you take issue with them about the poor quality of service you received.

    Remember, if you can’t resolve an issue with a CSR, It’s not always that they don’t want to resolve the issue for you, their hands are probably tied and in fear of losing their job or being reprimanded, they simply won’t budge.

    Kindness goes a long way with us as well, if you are respectful and kind, we reflect the same back to you and often have tools at our disposal to grant you an extra discount and/or savings. We genuinely want to see you happy!

    ON THE OTHER HAND

    If putting AI in front of the call centers will help screen out the most common issues, then by all means do it. Also, if the stupid bean counters out there which insist of outsourcing to third world countries as it’s cheaper, can find it to be more cost effective to use AI, and keep the jobs local to their country of operation, then I’m in favor of it.

  • The Dark Lord ☑️@lemmy.caEnglish
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    3 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.

    • rottingleaf@lemmy.zipEnglish
      0·
      3 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.

    • makingStuffForFun@lemmy.mlEnglish
      0·
      3 months ago

      We handle support in our company as part of our day to day. By and large the bulk of support is petiole 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
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        3 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.

    • AA5B@lemmy.worldEnglish
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      3 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.

    • Aurenkin@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
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      3 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
        0·
        3 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
          0·
          3 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
          0·
          3 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.

    • Deceptichum@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      0·
      3 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
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        3 months ago

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

    • Imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
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      3 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.

    • phoneymouse@lemmy.worldEnglish
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      3 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.

  • Cyber Yuki@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    3 months ago

    says CEO

    Since when do CEOs do things because they’re actually useful and not because they want to cut costs at the expense of the workers and even the public?

  • Dark Arc@social.packetloss.ggEnglish
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    3 months ago

    I might be the only one that’s kind of optimistic this will improve some of the cheapest call centers.

    Some of them … the people have such thick accents, don’t get any local references, the connection is bad, don’t know the first thing about the subject matter, etc.

    I called my health insurance company one time because CVS said my vaccine wasn’t covered there; the lady on the other end of the phone I could barely understand and I had to explain to her that CVS is a pharmacy. She still didn’t give me any helpful information. Eventually via poking around the website or something like that, I found out my insurance company doesn’t cover pharmacist administered vaccines … which is just insane to me.

    • 3volver@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      3 months ago

      Doesn’t sound insane to me, sounds like a perfect example of the state of the US healthcare system. I stopped paying for healthcare 2 years ago, best decision I ever made.

        • maynarkh@feddit.nlEnglish
          0·
          3 months ago

          Just to note, it’s not free, it’s not magic, it’s just better regulated. I’ve lived in a few countries with socialized healthcare, and we still pay insurance. It’s just a lot less since we don’t have to cover ever-increasing insurance profits, and there is no such thing as “out of network” as long as you don’t leave the country (and the rest of the EU).

          My premium is 116 EUR for full coverage per month, with no maximum coverage or any other fees, and every healthcare institution in the EU is going to treat me for that in an emergency, for no additional charge. If I need extended treatment, I will get transported to the institution that’s most convenient for me (and thus, the system), and be treated there. Dental, mental healthcare included.

          I still pay for some OTC medicine, but prices are kept low.

          • root@precious.netEnglish
            0·
            3 months ago

            Your premium is 116 EUR per month, plus the taxes people pay – which are much higher in those countries.

            You have also traded your freedom.

            The UK is currently talking about banning tobacco entirely in the name of reducing health costs despite it being a part of many cultures ceremonies and traditions. New York is still trying to control soda sizes in the name of public health. Canada now offers suicide as an option for people who would have a long (and costly) treatment with low probability of improving health.

            Pretty soon you’re setting a death age because old people use most of the healthcare. They make a Star Trek TNG episode about this. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half_a_Life_(Star_Trek:_The_Next_Generation)

          • flying_sheep@lemmy.mlEnglish
            0·
            3 months ago

            It’s not magic, but there will never be a life saving treatment that ruins you financially here in the EU. And travel insurance is dirt cheap here as well.