Technology

For really useless call centers this makes sense.

I have no doubt that a ML chatbot is perfectly capable of being as useless as an untrained human first level supporter with a language barrier.

And the dude in the article basically admits that's what his call center was like:

Suumit Shah never liked his company’s customer service team. His agents gave generic responses to clients’ issues. Faced with difficult problems, they often sounded stumped, he said.

So evidently good support outcomes were never the goal.

I've worked in this field for 25 years and don't think that ChatGPT by itself can handle most workloads, even if it's trained on them.

There are usually transactions which must be done and often ad hoc tasks which end up being the most important things because when things break, you aren't trained for them.

If you don't have a feedback loop to solve those issues, your whole business may just break without you knowing.

Cheaper than outsourcing to poor countries with middling English speaking capability.

Coming to call center lines near you: voiced chatbots to replace the ineffective, useless customer support lines that exist today with the same useless outcomes for consumers but endless juggling back and forth without any real resolutions. Let's make customer service even shittier, again!

On one hand, they're crap jobs. On the other hand, in most economies we have crap jobs not because they're necessary for productivity, but to give us an excuse to pay people to live.

Maybe if enough jobs are lost to automation, we'll start to rethink the structure of a society that only allows people to live if they're useful to a rich person.

Essentially, we're just still doing feudalism with extra steps, and it's high time we cut that nonsense out.

What if we get it to agree to give us stuff for free? Is it a representative of the company or not?

I see two inevitable problems;

1. we outsourced this to you because it was cheaper, if you're using ChatGPT what do we need you for?

2. companies want people to buy stuff, but if you significantly reduce the workforce you also reduce the availability of funds to buy stuff

Seems like a good way to get the "agent" to agree it's in the wrong, and get 100% refund

A lot of jobs are just busy work that does nothing and makes nothing. Talking about automating them misses the point of why the jobs exists in the first place.

"I see that you are throwing a ball at a target that is connected to a platform with a human sitting above a tank of water. Here is a AI generated picture of a random human underwater to sate your needs. Ya! I have made this process 200% more efficient!"

You still need to employ some humans as a backup when the AI catastrophically fucks up, but for the most part it makes sense. Not all jobs need to continue to exist.

Working conditions in this industry are not great. The turnover rate can reach 80% sometimes. It can be a difficult, stressful and low paid job that few people enjoy. At the same time, the demand for this work keeps increasing as more and more of consumer activity shifts online and remote. It seems to me that the technology may be a net benefit in this case. The public and its regulatory authority should, however, keep a close eye on developments to make sure humans are not left behind.