An e-commerce CEO is getting absolutely roasted online for laying off 90% of his support staff, after an AI chatbot outperformed them
An e-commerce CEO is getting absolutely roasted online for laying off 90% of his support staff, after an AI chatbot outperformed them
Suumit Shah, the CEO of Bengaluru-based Dukaan, said the chatbot answered customer queries in 2 minutes — a task that took the humans over 2 hours.
Suumit Shah, the CEO of Bengaluru-based Dukaan, said the chatbot answered customer queries in 2 minutes — a task that took the humans over 2 hours.
We're going to be watering plants with Gatorade soon, we're on our way.
89It's what plants crave!
42It's got electrolytes!
5
Water? Like out of the toilet?
10
I've worked in customer service software companies for the last 30 years, and one thing I can tell you is that average handle time is not a good metric to decide your success or failure on.
Having a low average handle time is easy. Just hang up on the customer. Or show them quickly that you won't do shit for them so that they hang up on you.
How about showing us those customer satisfaction and first call resolution scores?
88show them quickly that you won't do shit for them so that they hang up on you.
I do believe this is the reason why AI is so much faster than humans at this guy's company.
27Reminds me of my local Rally's switching to an "automated drive thru assistant." The jank thing doesn't even respond when you talk to it, just reminds you every 60 seconds that it's ready when you are. First time I went I drove off. Went a second time thinking it might have been a fluke and I'd get actual human service. Nope. Guess I'll be finding a new burger place for my hangovers
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26If the majority of the service requests are that quick, then it's probably something you can automate or by providing a knowledge base. It's the complex problems that require a human and I see us needing that for the foreseeable future
5Yes well we will never know any of that based on the metrics he's using to define success.
2
Did I miss the part about customer satisfaction? Guy could have just moved from solving customer issues in 2 hours to aggravating and loosing customers in under 2 minutes.
70Yeah, like, how do you even help someone in two minutes?? They probably just see "oh, it's a bot" and leave
27
Without any ratings for customer satisfaction. I might as well sack the entire support staff, don't bother with AI and I'll get a answered query to F off in 0 minutes and 100% savings.
46I mean this is what teslas PR email does, or is it Twitter... it's one of those lol
7I think it's twitter. Journalists often contact twitter because of controversies, and they try to highlight that Twitter always says nothing useful
2
This fails to say by what metric the bots are more efficient. Unless it’s just time-to-first-response. That’s the only metric referenced and it’s a stupid one if it’s the only metric.
24I'm pretty sure most of those layoffs that are contributed to AI are just dumb CEOs that a) buy into the hype that AI makes human workers superflous (which is just completely wrong at this point) and b) just needed a reason to fire a few people to get a bonus.
11It was interesting that the stats they were talking about were time to respond and time to close, which are both key customer service stats. I'd be interested to know what the customer satisfaction rating was.
If I message, and someone answers immediately, but I figure out it's a bot and I'm not getting anywhere after a minute, I stop and leave a bad review. From a time standpoint, the interaction looks great. When you integrate the CSAT score, it's terrible. A quick response contributes to a good interaction, but it doesn't make it good outright, unless you don't actually care about whether customers are helped.
5
Another paragraph masquerading as an article. Ironically, probably written by AI...
10AI is not the enemy, if we humans have to work less that's fine, just increase social programs so we can relax at home while the computer works.
7And someone else gets paid.
2
Imagine he goes to his own support bot just to get told to F off
6I like how that free market suddenly starts working now with technologies allowing idiots to kill themselves that easily.
It just has to stay more agile than the big guys and this really does work.
4Why is he getting roasted? Seems like he improved efficiency
-22Because he's only measuring how long the interactions were, not whether anything was accomplished for the customer or whether the customer was happy.
You know the easiest way to have a short interaction with a customer? Just hang up on them. Or piss them off quickly so they hang up on you.
37Because according to Reddit and Twitter, CEO = Bad. More than likely people are just knee-jerk reacting to the headline without reading the headline that says 90% of a company's staff lost their job to a chatbot.
The guy employed 60 people, almost half of which were support staff (26 people, less the 23 that got laid off). I'm assuming this was a text-based support link, so yeah if this guy could get his customers better support (2 min via chatbot vs 2 hours via live person), and the results are satisfactory, I'd do the same thing.
Some people on the internet seem to think that companies are supposed to be job charities, while failing to realize that put in the same position, they'd do the exact same thing.
Edit: Clearly this didn't go over very well. I'm not trying to say that letting those people go is a win for society, or that I welcome our AI overlords to displace our jobs. My point is that from a business standpoint, if an effective solution saves the company money, any company would be somewhat foolish not to implement it. And truth be told, this is only the beginning of the labor market in the coming years. It would be in everyone's best interest to develop skills that are much more difficult to be replaced by a computer.
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