Generative AI could soon decimate the call center industry, says CEO

Nah, it will be worse.

At least when you did get an answer it might be correct, not a hallucination.

welcome to the wonders of enshittification

Fake, that's way too coherent and competent to have come from a CEO.

I'm sorry, I don't understand. Let's try again. Pick from one of these 21 categories that don't describe your issue.

Not if they have full market dominance. There are tons of industries, shit man, almost every industry, is now dominated by a few behemoth corporations that collude and rule through olegopolism.

I think your debt would be erased if you convinced everyone to use a different fiat currency right?

Yes but your estimated wait time is .. 3 hours and.. 22 minutes.

I've noticed more and more are just hanging up on you now.

The poor quality is a benefit to these shitter corporations.

Oh sure you can get a refund, just go through customer service hell. It's all about that 1-10% group of people who give up and relent to the corporations infinite hunger for money.

If customer service wasn't experiencing "unprecedented " call volume, people would be more willing to get their rightful conflict resolution.

That would require these companies to treat customer service staff like human beings so they don't keep quitting after a month or end up being dead inside. They don't want to do that so robots it is!

Working in a call center sucks so much ass I've worked for more than one they have all tried to prevent me from using the restroom your job is to get yelled at all day in back to back phone calls everything you do is timed tracked and monitored and they do not want you to take one minute off the phones for any reason.

Two of the best call centers I've ever worked with would be Google Fiber and Intel. Both of which are probably terrible now.

(2015) Google Fiber actually had people who understood networking, understood my personal setup, and understood what tests I had already performed to diagnose that my issue with their equipment. No faffing about with a script, I gave them my test results and got an appointment for a replacement line in like, 15 minutes, and an immediate credit on the account.

(2009) Back when Intel made rock-solid vanilla motherboards I did a dumb and accidentally disabled legacy USB on my board, which meant that I couldn't press F2/DEL to get back into BIOS. I called Intel, gave them the troubleshooting steps I already ran (including jumper BIOS reset), and the call center forwarded me to the engineer who designed the motherboard. He whipped up and sent a bootable CD-ROM image to update the BIOS back to default and then updated all future revisions to avoid my issue.

I wish every call center was that good.

I build software that's used in call centers and have therefore been in several of them, including 2 in India. My team builds things that help with voice and chat.

I can't stress enough two things: the aim is and probably always will be to deflect away things that people could have Googled themselves. LLMs, if trained on the right stuff and not hallucinating, would genuinely be good on this.

Secondly, CCs and telecoms in general have not escaped the business cultural shift in the last 10 years to the frantic obsession with g r o w t h. So yes, they definitely are trying to sell you something on every call. However this really depends on the human personality involved, and any near-future LLMs would definitely struggle to sell you anything. Some of these people are magical at talking you into buying stuff. Do j mean scamming? No. The easiest thing to sell is the thing you'd probably benefit from, the hurdle being that you didn't know about it or aren't in the mood to buy because you called to complain about coverage. For European telecoms at least, there are severe penalties for misselling, too (that's part of what our software tracks).

So in summary, LLMs might replace the link you're sent to the FAQs page or the bit where you confirm who you are. But they are at least many years away from replacing the agents who can do what telecoms currently want them to do - turn the call into a sale.