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
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
I’m actually very torn on this. On the one hand, it will suck for customers with real problems to have to deal with poor customer service.
On the other hand, I work in IT. Most people call in with the stupidest questions that can be easily answered by a bot or by simply not being an idiot. And it really sucks to have someone intelligent deal with those questions 100 times a day.
Ideally robots would do all the shit jobs no one wants to do like sweep floors and tier 1 IT support. Then, hopefully, we could all get UBI and decide if we want to design and repair robots, or make bespoke jam, or do some other job robots generally can’t do. Alas.
Agreed, though as a customer my biggest pet peeve is having to talk to someone because the functionality is inexplicably not available on their website. If having a chat bot to do this gets around the issue I’m all for it.
A good example even before the whole LLM boom is that one of the couriers in my country (Purolator) implemented a truly useful chat bot a few years ago. I can do all kinds of stuff with it that you would have to call any other courier to get done, such as update my address to let the driver know a buzzer number.
I was on a bot chat the other day. “I have super admin permissions but it wont let me switch XYZ toggle.”
It said “I don’t understand this, can you rephrase?”
I said, “I can’t switch Xyz toggle despite having admin permissions.”
“I don’t understand can you rephrase”
“no.”
“connecting you to a real person”