Here's one way to cut support ticket volume… send them to another company entirely The CEO of the company behind note-taking app Obsidian says the well-known video game house of the same name has sent one of its customer queries to his own team – claiming that "off-the-shelf AI support software" is why the gaming firm gave a user the wrong email address. Steph Ango said on social media that note-taking crew …
The purpose of customer service is attrition. Customer wants to get to point R (resolution), but customer service has to guide them through points A, B, A, C, E, F, A, B, E, F, A, B, A, D until they stop writing.
Bonus points is when customer gets angry - they you can just close the case.
McAfee used to be like that. Them: "reboot, then reinstall, see if that fixes it" Me: "ok, but I can't reboot right now, this is a production server, I'll reboot and reinstall this weekend when the office is empty".
22 hours later, get an email "case automatically closed, no customer response."
I quickly learned to set a reminder to send daily update emails to keep the case open.
Bastards.
Yeah. I've been given the run-around a few times, and they're just trying to either provoke people or get them to give up. Last time I actually had to get a refund on something, it took 4 calls and as many escalations. I think they finally processed it (after telling me they would the 2nd time I called) to get rid of me, or one of them finally got it through their head that the next call I made was gonna be to my card issuer and I'd be getting my money back *that* way.
All Microsoft business lines have to hit a 30% profit margin and Copilot is mandatory everywhere in the company so closing support tickets with an AI slop answer and and automated e-mail responses for PR enquiries is the result.
* Obsidian Entertainment was bought by Xbox Game Studios in 2018. Everything Xbox Game Studios touches turns to crap (it's worth reading, it rips into MS' hopeless inept management).
I was kind of on the other end of this. Used to get really angry (American) people phoning the help desk for a company I worked for. Couldn't work out what the fuck they were banging on about. Turned out that some American state automated toll system was called the same name as the global internet roaming company I worked for.
Sadly, rebooting Windows XP computer didn't solve their issues with some fucking toll bridge in Iowa or whatever. Other American places starting with "I" exist.
Worked for a company where the QA criteria for shipping was <200 severity 1 bugs. As we approached the release date, all bugs were 'reviewed' and, surprise, surprise, we had less that the threshold, we shipped on time, everyone got a bonus and everyone was happy (except for our customers).
If a Microsoft employee creates enough PBIs in the right product areas, Teams bugs will eventually be fixed. But it took over a year the last time I tried (utterly hosed Bluetooth audio on Macs). Mostly they just get closed as "obsolete" having never been scheduled for a sprint.
Our company published thousands and thousands of leaflets and other promotional materials and sent them out to all our customers, as well as dished out at a major trade show.
The only issue was the contact number they published was that of Barclaycard.
Of course the marketing team had the bright idea, and they were deadly serious, of asking me (Telecoms guy) if I could contact Barclaycard and see if they could transfer the number over to us.
So you don't need AI to make stupid mistakes.
In 1999, for some reason I had become the "go-to" computer guy for many of the Veterinarians on The Peninsula[0]. They were all running late 1980s, early 1990s IBM PCs (486 "ValuePoint" machines, for the most part), with SCO Xenix, now updated/graded to ver. 5.x[1] ... The Vet Practice Management software was provided by IDEXX, but was built by PSI ... Needless to say, IBM, SCO, PSI and IDEXX all claimed the other three were responsible for any Y2K issues that may (or may not) crop up.
Most of the Vets, assured by these four companies wonderful bedside manner, switched to Cornerstone or Avimark software running on Win98. I cheerfully set 'em up and then dropped out of that world (except for a few cases). Xenix had worked great, was never an issue in all the years I took care of them. Windows ... well, you know. I wasn't in the mood for the inevitable headaches.
[0] The Peninsula is the local name for the bit of San Andreas Fault fractured rock roughly between the Golden Gate and Palo Alto.
[1] Note to the youngsters: That's the proper, original SCO, not the later, perverted SCO of litigation fame.
We've had more than one customer think anything vaguely web or network based means the request should be sent to us, and they quickly get redirected to their internal support or ISP.
Fortunately there's no 'AI' here yet, other than an initial automated response e-mail, but it's probably just a matter of time. There's enough mistakes made in responses using humans, I shudder to think what will happen if an LLM starts to construct confident sounding but wrong answers.
If a human tells the customer to delete all their data for the last month and it'll be OK, they can get sacked. How are you going to tell off an LLM when it's backed into a corner and spews out any old rubbish?
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