849
Half of companies planning to replace customer service with AI are reversing course
(www.techspot.com)
this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2025
849 points (99.2% liked)
Technology
71396 readers
3484 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Phone menu trees have their place, they can improve customer service - if they are implemented well, meaning: sparingly - just where they work well.
Same for AI, a simple: "would you like to try our AI common answers service while you wait for your customer service rep to become available, you won't lose your place in line?" can dramatically improve efficiency and effectiveness.
Of course, there's no substitute for having people who actually respond. I'm dealing with a business right now that seems to check their e-mails and answer their phones about once per month - that's approaching criminal negligence, or at least grounds for a CC charge-back.
I assume you mean IVR? It's okay to be not familiar with the term. I wasn't either until I worked in the industry. And people that are in charge of them are usually the dumbest people ever.
I think that's actively encouraged by management in some areas: put the dumbest people in charge to make the most irritating frustrating system possible. It's a feature of the system.
Some of the most irritating systems I have interacted with (government disability benefits administration) actually require "press 1 for X, press 2 for y" and if you have your phone on speaker, the system won't recognize the touch tones, you have to do them without speakerphone.
AI + worker effort is the sweet spot for efficiency and accuracy
...and it's only expensive and ruins the environment even faster than our wildest nightmares
what you say is true but it's not a viable business model, which is why AI has been overhyped so much
What I’m saying is the ONLY viable business model
not at the current cost or environmental damage
Yeah but these pesky workers cut into profits because you have to pay them.
They're unpredictable. Every employee is a potential future lawsuit, they can get injured, sexually harassed, all kinds of things - AI doesn't press lawsuits against the company, yet.