
You mean I've been talking to humans when I contact support? Wow.
Vodafone has replaced 2,600 roles with "600 bots" as part of a "long-lasting structural opportunity to reduce cost", the company revealed in its half-year results earnings call. The telco has a growing debt pile following its acquisition of Liberty Global's European assets this quarter and a hit of €1.8bn due to India's …
I know for fact (first hand) that IBM replaced first line internal technical support (like when your 5yr old laptop died) with a similar system. I'm not sure whether it is sad or amusing but they also gave the system an Indian accent so people would feel they were talking to someone real....
"And I think that what I was pleased about with the Openreach offer is these economics are a lot more comparable to what we have with CityFibre. So finally, they stepped forward with a model that we could, let's say, find sufficiently attractive."
Sounds like they have the Trump AI bot already answering news reporters questions. I've never heard of "more comparable attractive ecomomics" before, presumably a human would have said "good price".
actually, there's more to this awful message which comes from a single "already"
1. they're soooo proud of it, positively beaming at how they have manged to overcome this "challenge"
2. quite possibly it's not the end of this "reduction process" yet.
is just a bunch of logic boards, would the last human please turn out the lights when you leave\are fired... I'm talking to you CEO.
And for the love of all that is living, don't provide the bots with any form 2001: A Space Odyssey no text, no dvd, nothing! I'd hate to hear 'I'm sorry Dave, I can't do that" after question
I'll pass the "2 rox 2gether" message to my better 1/2, her company, they recently "merged" with the other. And, as it happens in real life, due diligence which was due before, is happening now, when it's too late, because the other rock, when inspected at close quarters, turns out to be a lump of lead. Christmas reductions, anyone? :(
Christmas reductions, anyone?
See, for all people bang on about employment rights, when they focus on shit that really doesn't matter, while this sort of thing does.
Why can we not have two simple changes:
1) Employees name to be kept confidential in employment disputes unless the employer wins - you can't enforce your rights in court if it's going to damage your ability to get your next job(s), and in many professional industry's it does.
2) No RIF between 1st Nov and 31st Jan unless the whole C-suite forgo pay, benefits, and stock during that timeframe. My bank routinely culls in the run up to year end and it's effectively locking people out of their next job until Feb/Mar when budgets get signed off. Can these people not plan ahead more than 3 months? Really?
Cutting heads in the run up to Christmas is pretty merciless, and I say this as quite possibly the Reg's biggest capitalist.
How do you actually quantify how many 'bots' your company has? Do you have 600 subtly different versions of chatbot software? Does your software run on 600 different machines? Or as 600 different instances? Or is it just one large distributed piece of software that can manage 600 conversations at once?
It's being positioned that a single unit of 'bot' is equivalent or comparable to a human worker, but the measure of the chatbot software's capability is actually incredibly vague.
"How do you actually quantify how many 'bots' your company has?"
I wondered about this as well. I eventually decided it must mean that the bot system will have the capacity to handle 600 calls simultaneously. They seem to think it'll take a quarter of the time to resolve calls with the bot than a human. Somehow I find that unlikely.
Not entirely. The bots don't take lunch breaks/holiday... but still, massive reduction, not sure if those spare bodies covers the total "cost savings".
Usually, you use the change as an excuse to skimp in total, not just change to a cheaper model. "We got you these cheaper tools to save money", "um, there's half as many tools as I normally need", "but we saved money!!!".
More likely it's 'cos 'bots run 24/7.
The headline was rather loose: the quote in the article doesn't imply such a direct relation. But if a human call-centre operator clocks on 8 hours a day, 230 days a year (less time off sick/etc), and takes ten minutes an hour coffee break/loo break, you can see how a bot might do the work of many.
It's being positioned that a single unit of 'bot' is equivalent or comparable to a human worker, but the measure of the chatbot software's capability is actually incredibly vague.
I'm not sure they are positioning it as such.
600 bots, 2600 people. Its very likely a single chat bot can replace whole call centers. In McDonalds they may need more screens as people are slower at ordering than staff were at entering them into the tills, but the cost of each screen is probably £2k so for the cost 1 staff member they can have at least 15 screens.
Good or bad for people depends on what you believe will happen next - scrap heap of life, or opportunity to get a better role. I expect there's no universal outcome......
They've replaced those jobs *for ever*, not just for a single annual pay cycle.They can (and will, according to the article) scale it up too. IT won't cost *another* 48bil to replace the next 2600 jobs, and so on.
So 48B in development etc isn't just to save the costs of those 2600 jobs, they were just the jobs picked off first. Going forwards the cost/replaced job will be (relatively speaking) a few quid.
ok , so if they're on 18.5 k , it'll only take a thousand years , assuming theres no interest on the debt
The point he's making is that the next job to go will probably now cost less than £100 to replace by leveraging the new bot capability into a marginally different role or by scaling up the hardware / software.
The point he didn't make but could have, is that this could be a very lucrative side business for Voda, in the same way that AWS was for Amazon (and it's now most of their revenue).
Automation is coming, and gnashing our teeth & wailing isn't going to help. We either need to structure society for population reduction (and if AGW IS real then we have to do that anyway), or we need to move people up the education scale into harder to replace roles. Or both.
Barry Bot: Hi, your speaking to Barry Bot. How can I help?
Me: I have terrible reception and would like to cancel the service
Barry Bot: That is great that you have amazing reception and would like to upgrade your service. Should I upgrade your account now?
Me: No I would like to cancel the service
Barry Bot: Thank you. Your service has been upgraded to our most expensive package with less coverage. Good bye
As a Barry I find your post highly offensive!
A Barry Bot would also have signed you up for broadband .... at three different addresses .... none of which are yours! You would also have found all of the videos and photos on your phone posted online, and your face donated to every deepfake development project currently available!
Do not rile the Barry Bot for he is quick to anger and your digital life is crunchy and tasty!
The last time I phoned Vodafone support I spoke to some clueless human being in an Indian call centre who suggested I needed to climb the telegraph pole outside my house and put a new cable from there to my house.
Considering how bad automated speech recognising menus are, "I'm sorry I didn't understand that. Please state in a few words the reason for your call". I can just imagine the fun trying to explain a technical problem to a bot.
They might just as well borrow the IT Crowd approach and have something repeating in a loop "Have you turned it off and on again? Is it plugged in?" for what use I expect a bot to be.
"That's a bigger debt than most countries"
Than most countries... probably not
Than some countries... almost certainly yes
It's difficult to get a true handle as I see complete lists it shows as % of GDP or per capita, not absolute.(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_public_debt ).
But as a hyperbolic way of describing that debt as absolutely massive, spot on!
Will the email messagebot understand my standard closing paragraph to all support communications:
"If there is anything in this message that you cannot understand or cannot resolve, please escalate it to someone who can".
It usually cuts the number of off-topic form reply loops down to one, as I can immediately complain that my complaint has not been handled correctly, and that is handled by a different desk from the complaints about operational issues.
"And I think that what I was pleased about with the Openreach offer is these economics are a lot more comparable to what we have with CityFibre. So finally, they stepped forward with a model that we could, let's say, find sufficiently attractive."
Translation: They're going to pay us almost as much yet we have to do far less work.
I've found Indian call centre staff to be better able to understand and fix issues than UK staff.
I'm assuming the money they pay over there atrracts more people but maybe it's due to better hiring practices or something else.
I've used Vodafone's bots - found them sufficiently frustrating that I'll happily look elsewhere when my current contract runs out.
Just let me check. -2600 staff. Assuming a (grossly) overinflated rate of £500/day; we have approx £1.3M/day. Times 300 days? £390M/yr reduction. £48bn of debt. Even if that's at 2%; the interest is still outstripping that saving.
Considering that they still pay a relatively high dividend (in order to try and raise funds from the stock market, because they can't borrow at 2% anywhere), they are in serious, serious trouble.
Bye bye vodafone.
Just yesterday I spoke to Lucy, a chatbot...
On 23rd October I upgraded, in shop, my 35mb fibre broadband to the next tier up to 64mb. I've had no problems with the Vodafone service at all.
A few days ago neither the speed increases [ sometimes up to 42mb briefly ] nor the new router having arrived I spoke to an Indian gentleman, who was unable to help me since I was unable to recall offhand the last 4 digits of the direct debit account I pay with.
Yesterday the new router did appear [ fancy that ! ], and within half an hour I had disconnected the old and installed the new --- which, by the way, is a very splendid router indeed [ Model No. THG3000, made in Vietnam --- it really is lovely ] --- my Mint Linux computer [ although on this KDE distro the networking modules have never been intuitive, relying mostly on continual restarts until the WiFi is picked up ] found the signal and stated the connection was good.
Incidentally, Vodafone provide the password in 4 segments for easy comprehension, but neglect to mention one must squash these together to make one word. Anyway, it worked.
Yet... although all lights on the router indicated all working, and the computer indicated all working, no data at all went through.
After several restarts I rang Vodafone and was lucky enough to speak to Lucy, who was unable to understand simple words but finally routed me through to broadband complaints; I then heard 30 repetitions of some girl saying "We Are Sorry, All Our Customer Advisors Are Busy' for half an hour until I terminated the call.
I then reinstalled the old router.
I for one look forward to the day when the Vodafone management realise that if you automate shitty processes with RPA they still generate shit data.
Talk about not understanding the source of the problem. Still it probably got the head of customer experience or some similar role their bonus this year.
The outrage of everyones job handed to someone on the other side of the world has been shown to be a stopgap before they are then handed on to automation.
Why did it happen this way? Imagine trying to train AI to have the nous and experience contained in the original role. Better to start from dunderhead clueless level and match that first.
Yes.
It has been noted that if the third-world struggling masses coming over the Rio Grande took instead the jobs of reporters and commentators, Wall Street economists, and university professors of the more idle uses [ 'Gender Inequality and Male Dominance in Goldfish Hierarchical Relationships ] with time on their hands; and all the others of Hillary's gruesome tribe, who screamed and wept so delightfully at the Javits Center that one time, there would be a lot less anguish and encouragement over immigration.
Just pointing this out instantly makes one a Trumpite --- which shows how little they understood the issues of their masses.