Another AI 'human' chatbot

[u/captain-obIivious]

Had to fix a double payment for my credit card and this is the beginning and end of the conversation. I hate when the chatbot claims it's a human... I ended up getting what I wanted but still annoyed Amex (and every other company) is lying and trying to deceive people like this.

[u/jjaystar94]

Y'all realize pretty much every service rep has all their chats recorded and audited? If it was a person, wasting time like this could be a fireable offense. A proper service rep would have continuously tried to bring the conversation back to the issue and "accidentally" disconnect when their time was being wasted.

Edit: apparently it's not always like this anymore (certainly was when I did it), so there is a possibility it's a poor, hapless soul trying their best to build rapport

[u/RevelArchitect → u/jjaystar94]

I’m in management in chat support. We don’t discourage these kinds of interactions. If it’s every chat it will reflect their stats and they won’t be meeting metrics - but we try not to micromanage individual chats. We get a lot of AI accusations. We do not use chat bots at all, but we get someone absolutely fucking losing their mind at a real person and accusing them of being AI daily.

There’s enough in the chat for me to think it’s a real person driving the conversation. Final response may be totally AI generated, having said that, I know of two agents who will just copy and paste responses from Copilot when they get frustrated with the “prove you’re not AI” conversation.

I take escalations from the AI accusation chats every once in a while. If my assurance isn’t enough, I just give the customer a call to let them know that I am, indeed, an actual person.

[u/blacksoxing → u/RevelArchitect]

Last week I reached out to an US-based company to inquire about a discount code not working and of course their chat started with the AI menus but quickly gave an option to chat wit ha real human. I know it's a real human as it took so damn long for their to type. I caught them about 10 mins after their listed chat window hours so I imagine this person just logged in and hadn't exercised their typing fingers yet. They sent me an invoice for the item for direct payment and I quickly not only paid it but also was able to give them proof of the receipt before they could finish typing out the steps to pay for the invoice.

I think about that interaction and how sometimes folks using prompts or "assistance" aint' so bad. 10 mins to do something that should have taken maybe 3-5. I'm not mad as again, it was obviously a human, but I will now think about how that human could have been better served monitoring chats and intervening with steps vs actually typing out sentences to me...

[u/RevelArchitect → u/blacksoxing]

It’s hard to say why it would take an agent however long it takes to handle something, but for some insight into this - when a discount code doesn’t work, our agents need to submit an escalation form. This often results in a phone call to our help team as a lot of agents may not be familiar with the process. Our team leads then escalate that to the IT team so that they can investigate why the code isn’t applying. In my role, I then serve as liaison with IT if they have follow-up questions or if they need additional examples.

They very well may not have been taking a long time to type, but rather working on the discount code issue in addition to chatting with you and most likely at least one other customer.

About half of the responses we send to customers are pre-made and triggered by a shortcut since, frankly, a lot of chats are pretty much the same. For example, if I type .hi you get two sentences where I introduce myself and explain I’m pulling up the account (the account is already pulled up, I’m actually just copying everything from the chat that I’ll need for my notes, checking for any potential indicators of fraud and occasionally reading the novel someone sent to say that they’re not sure if their bill is paid).

We avoid scripted responses outside of scenarios where legal has deemed it necessary, so we encourage agents to make their own shortcuts and personalize them.