ChatGPT (launched November 2022) and similar LLMs were supposed to make customer service agents more efficient. Has this happened? From what I can tell, the opposite has occurred. If I call a company that is supposed to be providing service the inevitable greeting is “we are experiencing higher than normal call volume” (i.e., demand for service exceeds agent capacity, despite the agents now being augmented with AI). When an agent does pick up, he/she/ze/they immediately asks, “What is your phone number?” In other words, the smartest computer systems ever devised cannot use caller ID.
(If Trump gets elected this fall and then, as predicted by the New York Times and CNN, ends American democracy, I hope that he will issue a decree that companies aren’t allowed to announce “we are experiencing higher than normal call volume” more than 5 percent of the time.)
My favorite company for customer service is Hertz. They recently hit my credit card for $262.41 for a 24-hour 29-mile rental of a compact Ford Edge in El Paso. I never signed anything agreeing to pay $262 and their app was quoting $76 including all fees (I picked up the car at an FBO so there wasn’t the fully array of Hertz computer systems on site). When I called Hertz to try to figure out why they charged so much I learned that they’ve eliminated the option of talking to a human regarding any bill. A human will be happy to make a reservation, but not to answer questions about what could be a substantial credit card charge. Hertz funnels all questions about past rentals to a web form, which they say they will respond to within a few days. Of course, my first inquiry about the bill yielded no response. My second inquiry, a week later, yielded a “everything was done correctly” response. I finally pinged them on Twitter private message. They admitted that they had no signed paperwork with an agreement to pay $262 and issued a refund of about half the money.
Circling back to AI… if LLMs make customer service agents more efficient, why has Hertz needed to shut down phone customer service? And if LLMs are brilliant at handling text why isn’t Hertz able to respond to contact form inquiries quickly?
Here’s an example pitch from the AI hucksters:
Wow. We know know the name of the last remaining Hertz customer.
I probably would have punted it to Visa/MC as a disputed charge and let them arm wrestle with Hertz.
Didn’t they just dump 100,000 battery cars? I like cordless tools as much as the next guy, even though you have to have a second battery on the charger while you work. But cordless cars? Ya kidding me?
Hopefully the auto blog script has a Trump post queued up. We’ve got a lot to comment on.
lion: It never occurred to me that New York Democrats would have any difficulty in convicting their hated opponent, so I’m not sure what there is to say. But maybe I could find an angle that would be worthy of a post. I was trying to see why our pinball machines were claiming to be offline and checked nytimes.com to see if our Internet was up. The site was unreachable. But other web sites were working. So it turns out the nytimes was overwhelmed by joyful readers and Stern’s servers are also suffering (unlikely from the Trump conviction, but rather because they just recently pushed out new code for the James Bond machine).
Errr, Did I miss a post about pinball machines on the internet at the Greenspun Casa?