2d ago

Call Centers Replaced Many Doctors’ Receptionists. Now, AI Is Coming for Call Centers.

Call Centers Replaced Many Doctors’ Receptionists. Now, AI Is Coming for Call Centers. - KFF Health News

At one call center in the Philippines, workers help Americans with diabetes or neurological conditions troubleshoot devices that monitor their health. Sometimes they get pressing calls: elderly patients who are alone and experiencing a medical emergency.

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I coached my grandma to just repeat "I want to talk to a human operator, please" over and over until she got through. It worked about 70% of the time but some are nearly impenetrable.
- I called Comcast and it was horrible
  human, operator, GET HUMAN, person, technician, for fucks sake! Bomb? Give me a fucking human!
  Nope, nothin, mashing 0 on the keypad also did nothing.
  
  I build call centers.
  When we design the call flows, those are the first tings we disable. You can tell a company at least slightly cares about their customer base if they actually do allow you to escalate to a human without a ton of effort. Most don't, and want to shove "AI" in front of everything, so they can hire even less people in low-cost markets. Offshoring wasn't cheap enough for these ~~leeches~~ companies, now they want AI to replace those folks making starvation wages to get yelled at all day.
  And sometimes, these solutions work well. Most of the time, they work just well enough to not have people quitting their service in frustration.

They literally tried this last time and called it "AI." They used Siri clones to replace receptionists but they sucked and that's why call centers became the norm.
- Hmmm years back they were using mturk and underpaying for a bit.
  But the ai is good for like 95% of questions people ask.
  
  Buddy if you want to talk to an AI be my guest but don't act like 19/20 people find them useful as phone receptionists unless you are going to post a detailed study to that effect. 👍
  
  If I'm going to have to talk to a computer just put it on a fucking website. There are 0 circumstances where I ever want to speak to a machine.

This won't go well.

So, the Klarna pattern?

Its either this or people in India. Once one company does it the price of that good falls and the CPI prints more money entrenching the shrinkflation.

I recently had a good experience with one of these where I was able to schedule an appointment for a contractor. They actually repeated my info back to me to make sure it was correct and I understood it.
So many times receptionists are either hard to understand or make a fuck up on some simple task.

I do call center work for a medical insurance company and some providers are already doing this. There is one that has a bot called EVA and she’s really pushy, doesn’t understand challenges or handle being told she’s wrong, she will ask several questions but let you only answer one before moving on rather than letting you answer her completely, she’s just a disaster. In some cases she will just hang up on you can call back and do it all again. I am absolutely certain she’s going to get that provider sued eventually.
- Oh yeah the hanging up on you is really common. I would literally prefer a phone tree than having to talk to an AI because if what I wanted was something that would be simply explained to an AI, I would have done it myself on the website. The reason I'm calling is because I need someone with an actual brain, and in an understanding of the business, to use their brain to assist me with my somewhat complicated situation.
  One time I got a credit card sent to my address that was for someone else. The letter was somehow addressed to me, but the credit card wasn't for me and I hadn't requested a credit card from this company. So I called the support line up and the stupid AI kept asking me for my customer ID. I told it I didn't have a customer ID because I wasn't a customer, and it said "thank you" and hung up on me. Fantastic.
  In the end I had to call them out on Twitter in order to get in contact with a human.

Soon we will reach peak enshitification

In the food industry we switched from a dedicated employee on phones to call center with doordash if we agreed to also test Ai call takers too when they roll that out.

fuck yeah!

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