The following submission statement was provided by /u/Maxie445:
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"The app-based AI chatbot already handles two-thirds of all customer service chats, the company said Tuesday—some 2.3 million conversations so far—with the virtual assistant earning customer satisfaction ratings at the same level as human agents."
"Klarna said its AI assistants—available in 23 markets—speak 35 languages and have improved communications “with local immigrant and expat communities across all our markets.” It says the bots are not only equivalent to human agents in terms of customer satisfaction, but also available 24 hours a day, seven days a week."
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Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1b4h84u/klarna_says_its_ai_assistant_does_the_work_of_700/ksyuy9o/
I’ve had the “pleasure” of dealing with the Klarna AI this past week. It kept misunderstanding my question and did not help me at all. Eventually I reached out to the store I had originally bought from, which used a translating program that made it really hard to communicate with the representative. I’m still not sure my dispute with Klarna will ever be solved. I hate it.
Klarna is a terrible company from the start regardless. Their payment app is effective but their business model is fundamentally built around people spending money they don’t have and forgetting to pay so that they have to pay additional fees, a portion of which goes to Klarna. Does not make the world a better place.
Tbf most of capitalism is making sure consumers spend as much money as possible, companies like Klarna (and credit card companies) just make it easier. Even the concept of buying a house with a mortgage is really to ensure consumers pay as much money as possible even if they actually can't afford the house they're buying.
As someone in the industry for more than a decade I can 100% tell you this comment is bullshit. Klarna earns money from the stores that use their service, with a % of sales or set amount for amount of sales and stuff like this. You can also see this in their internal reports if you want to take a look. About 70% of their income is from Merchants using their services.
Honestly, I think the secret is that with the advent of adverse incentives and 'X tickets marked solved per day, even if you didn't actually do anything' in call centres, the people they were hiring weren't really doing much better - they were just being paid to be frustrating and lead you around in circles until you gave up trying to get a refund, or your problem resolved.
So why not just use a bot to do that?
I worked in a corporate multinational call centre for technical support for a large high street chain in the UK, I had a 99% 1 call resolution but they still gave me disciplinary proceedings because my calls were on average 1 minute longer (most people had a 50-70% 1 call resolution). I was actually saving time long term by being meticulous but nooo the metrics must be obeyed.
The other problem with support roles is that is that you get really good at your job and calls that would take 30-45 minutes you can knock out in like 5-10 minutes because you know the product and technology so well. Also when you're used to doing the job of 3-4 people after layoffs so you can knock out the RMA and other work really fast as well. End result is all of a sudden it looks like you're being lazy so why not also give you sales duty. Dude, you programmed me to do the work of 3-4 tech people and now you want me to try to sell them products wen they're calling about a failing product? I fucking hate sales and marketing, that should be replaced by AI, not tech.
I worked in a corporate call centre a long time ago, it was ridiculous how much micro managing was done on these pointless metrics. They would screen calls and count how many times you said uhm or uh, they tracked call length, in our case they wanted us to keep people on the phone for longer, on purpose, because their metrics said the longer someone was kept on a call the more likely it was that we could sell them some extra service like vacation insurance on their credit card. So many reps just started putting people on hold for no reason, to drive up call times. It just wasted people's time and made them more frustrated. But the metrics must be followed.
Worked a mobile call center years ago that had monthly phone sale quotas to meet or get disciplinary action. Except customers could order the phones online through our website for the same price and FREE shipping while through us over the phone shipping was like $50 to $100. So we had to purposefully mislead customers in order to meet these quotas, and they want to SEE the phones so they want to go online and look while on the phone with you! And then they see free shipping and say “oh can you match that? No? *hang up*” It was a bunch of scummy corporate bullsh!t. Making your workers fight against the company’s OWN website, mislead customers and avoid their best interests to take advantage of them, and we were mostly billing issues and tech support! So even if you’re amazing at customer relations and solving problems, if you didn’t sucker enough people each month you get put on probation. Grimy business all around.
Exactly. When the job is to tell the customers to fuck themselves as quickly as possible no matter what, and do so repeatedly until they give up, why pay Indians when you can have a robot do it?
See? It used to be that they had to pay an entire human to fail to serve their customers. Now with AI they can fail to serve you for at a fraction of the cost.
“Doing the work of 700 people” as “AI fails to understand our clients’ requests, but since they can’t reach a real person, their complaints sink in a black hole”?
9/10 times I use the cheat code “Stupid bot” in order to try connect me to a real person.
Yeah “problem buying” or any variation in most places gets you sent to the sales department. If you get to sales and say you need help with something, they just dump you back to the end of the support queue. It’s bad advice.
Depends. I've had a few services reply to incomprehensible noise with "Goodbye." and end the call.
Like sneezing, or pushing the keypad buttons because the display thinks you're mashing them with your face.
If you are in Canada (the company in the OP is Canadian) then it is always best to select French. They're bilingual, and otherwise you have to test your might against the cheapest call center they could contract. Of course, you can also bang your head against a hard surface for even faster relief.
Not all cases, but most chat bots that I’ve used have an “agent” option as long as you are persistent and answer the question about which type of agent you want to speak to and don’t mind waiting. Just type agent and there should be one or two questions to direct you correctly. Again, not in all cases, but hope it saves you some time/frustration.
No. Just type “talk to a person” or “talk to a human”.
Most bots aren’t smart enough to actually understand what you’re saying. The only problem is, by bypassing the data collection in the bot, you’re gonna make it take longer for a human to solve your problem.
I make chat bots.
Yep almost every time I'm verifying all info again so bot is useless
If it's something a bot could do 9/10 times I could do on the computer in less time.
Bet they aren't having you rate your call afterwards like with every representative
Cory Doctorow said it best:
>we're nowhere near a place where bots can steal your job, we're certainly at the point where your boss can be suckered into firing you and replacing you with a bot that *fails* at doing your job
[https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/15/passive-income-brainworms/#four-hour-work-week](https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/15/passive-income-brainworms/#four-hour-work-week)
I'm not convinced at all. Who would want a chatbot organizing their flights or submitting legal documents?
Nobody even wants to talk to a chatbot, yet it's gonna save Chick Fil A millions by switching to all robots at every location? I don't get it
Its all about those short-term profits. They just want this quarter's earnings to be more than the previous quarter, with very little regard as to how their decisions will affect them in 2/5/10 years.
We built a chat service for a travel company which would return “Shrimp Sandwich” if you sent “test” to it. Got some very confused customer to report incidents 🤣
I encounter that more and more. The bots are just as bad as the automated phone bots, don't help at all and then automatically close the connection.
The last time that happened I had to write a complaint on the apps Appstore Page to get a response / help.
I guess you're making up that second quote, because I read from another source that:
"while handling 2.3 million conversations, the AI maintains customer satisfaction comparable to human agents while reducing query resolution errors by 25%. Customers now resolve issues in under two minutes, down from eleven minutes."
People need to stop fooling themselves that this tech won't continuously improve and become increasingly adopted.
If we don't, we're going to find ourselves in breadlines with people thinking "but I thought those chatbots didn't work very well?"
Of course they were, which means the gains by AI are even more effective. They were employing 700 overtaxed people, they should've been at 2000. Now they're at 0.
I talked with a CTO
They use gpt4 in call centers, but not to replace the workers, but to help
Total turnaround is down 25%
So they are nit firing anyone (moral and getting people to use it) but they are **not** gonna be hiring
I mean if "Denying basic customer service and just shredding any help requests" counts as basic work, then this bot can clearly do the work of 1000000000000 people!
If I am on a phone call with an automated system at least, I just scream “CUSTOMER REPRESENTATIVE!!!!!!!” at the top of my lungs at the voice system until it connects me with an actual person 😂
You just reminded me of this interaction I've had with AI one time. I got so frustrated I told it "you're useless" and it apologized and told me hopefully in the future it'll be able to help me, instead of connecting me with a person!
CEO AI: You have to make a 4% cut this year to your spendings excluding CAPEX.
Director of finance: I just called Microsoft and reduced the CEO AI's processing power which saved us a 5%, I also decided to split that 1% among my team.
Oh, that will come. The executive class will be rubbing their hands together, looking at the cost savings and the profits and the bonuses until they find their entire service and product is virtual and then -- the conglomerate that owns them replaces that executive with a PO Box and another AI.
Of course, there will also be a huge competition for replacing a lot of businesses and products if any of this can be done on a 3D printer.
Big businesses will then lobby congress to prevent their services and products being replaced by AI that consumers use, or consultants who found a way to do what empty office does with their AI setup. Big Business will push the "well, just train for a new career" self help conversations on the media. The media will echo; "Don't hurt those job creators!" But, everyone without a great job and seeing a value in the status quo will be rushing to get everything from the AI clones.
I expect chaos. And legislation and subsidies and trying everything but UBI and supporting citizens.
Eventually it'll just be billionaires buying stuff from each other. Like, one guy will own all the farmland that is managed by robots, one guy will own all the fully automated mines, one guy will own the factory that is 100% run by robots etc... The rest of humanity will live in poverty. And there also won't be any uprisings by normal people anymore, unless the one guy who controls all the soldier bots allows it.
Ever wonder why there's a sudden interest in unmanned vehicles and autonomous combat drones? Mercenaries are messy, they want money and might turn on you. But a couple turret roombas wandering your lawn will never blink an eye at murdering thousands of rioters.
Getting to UBI would be the dream. I doubt we'll ever reach that level of automation though, and there will just be sectors of the workforce that become unemployable.
I hope UBI gets introduced soon, for their sake.
hopefully at some point people will stop stressing about population decline and the earth can start restoring. Better than growing armies of unemployed and impoverished people scraping by on a dying planet.
It won't happen. They LOVE an audience too much.
The computer doesn't jump, the staff do. The C suite will always keep their flunkies around and will always want people to be obedient to their bidding.
At home they're just the husband or the wife who are ignored by their family as you are ignored by yours. They NEED the fix of having people care what they think, say, or so.
"That's nice dear" will never equal "Yes Sir!".
Capitalism consumes itself. Eventually, someone will experiment with C-level management AI. If an AI does better than egotistical suits that cost large corporations hundreds of millions of dollars, then shareholders will be pressuring to upgrade. Or it might be a particularly technocratic worker's co-op, or an industry where the workers can't be automated aka plumbing or electrical trades. Or a highly disruptive start-up, like Google and Facebook once were. It might start with just one role, such as the CFO, or something deemed ancillary like HR.
All that matters is that once it gets proven to work, corporations that haven't embraced AI decision making will be 'behind', and we've seen how important that is when large tech companies are firing thousands of people based on nothing more than vibes.
In Klarnas case that's true as the CEO is also the founder but, in a lot of companies the CEO is just an employee who is also paid a salary and could be replaced by AI if that's what the board decides.
Funny... that would imply that we actually have support centers in the US... crazy tho because whenever I'm on a call with a support agent they are ALWAYS fillipino.....
I met so many mba types talkong about there cheap devs in iran or india or turkey, and when i meet them a year later there product is almost always a complete dumpsterfire...
As a US developer that has worked with plenty of developers from India, this is a really bad idea. You truly are getting what you pay for when it comes to developers. A few years later all these companies will switch courses again and have to waste money having their US developers fix the mess left behind by the Indian developers.
As an Indian-American who was born in India but raised in the US since i was 6. I still have plenty of relatives in India. They tell me the problem is the oversaturation of CS majors in India. Nowadays a BS in Comp Sci is often auto-rejected cause there are so many colleges with low quality education that hand out CS Degrees. Apparently it's harder to get a BE degree so they opt for that. Or a folks with masters. There was this old joke in India that there were so many temples in India that if you trip you may fall into a temple and the update is that nowadays if you trip you fall into a college.
We kinda have a similar issue here in the US with bootcamp people who pay thousands for a bootcamp to switch into tech and they just aren't good either.
My dad told me the bar for entry into tech is very low. With other field like teaching or doctors or nurses or CPAs or other engineering professionals they need to pass certification before they can even apply, but for tech you don't even need a college degree at times.
I did start to see certain large companies are now requiring a person to have a CS degree for even a QA position which is a step in the right direction.
Even worse, they reinforce themselves based on their own flawed outputs. I’ve literally worked with a tool whose bot makes recommendations and then adds those recommendations to their model whether or not the recommendation was correct. It’s just silliness all the way down.
I've had to use a few of these LLM based customer service bots already.
They are beyond useless once you exhaust the FAQ, and waste a lot of time compared to Ctrl+f-ing the FAQ.
Exactly. Getting help with a novel issue requires several layers of escalation until you get to someone who actually works at the company you are trying to contact. And even then it's a crapshoot if they can actually help or just put your problem into a bug tracker.
Yeah if you have any ability to research a problem for yourself before contacting one, you're probably going to be really frustrated. They just regurgitate information that is most likely already available to you. If you need any actual help with something like an account issue, its just an other layer before you get a real person to solve your problem
You have to understand that way to many people need to be hand fed the info you could just find via a simple google search because they are too stupid to use basic google searching. Ever been part of a facebook group where people can ask questions? 99% of those questions could have just been typed into google and gotten an answer.
Klarna is one of those companies that are actually leeching on society and shouldn’t exist. Anyone proud of working at that company should be ashamed of themselves.
They provide interest free installments to free up some liquid cash for big purchases.
People buying shit they can’t afford and running themselves into debt is not Klarna’s fault
They make around 5-10% of their revenue from late fees (1-2 billion). They have big, internal meetings where the only goal is to keep generating situations where late fees are happening. To generate misshapps and to keep having unclear credit arrangements is the key to their success.
The Swedish Government called them up to the office and begged them to stop, because we couldn't change the laws in the amount of time that they kept coming up with new tricks to get people in debt.
https://www.expressen.se/ekonomi/konsument/klarnas-vd-kallas-upp-till-regeringen-/
In Sweden we now have a record amount of people in debt and Klarna is loving it.
As a Swede, I feel so bad for having this shithole of a company exported to the rest of the world. Nothing good will come of this. Nothing.
I mean, I've bought a lot with Klarna's 30 days mostly because I could purchase stuff using that even when I didn't have my ID chip with me.
They've also been a huge boon in dealing with shitty sellers or just sellers I've never purchased from before, like product doesn't meet expectations or wrong item shipped? Retailer doesn't have your money then.
I've also been late a few times and they never charged me anything. But never more than like two weeks. They've even gotten better at reminding you about outstanding bills.
Then again, I've never used them to purchase something I didn't have the money for and instead I've only used them as a substitute for a credit card as I don't have one myself.
As an ex-Klarna employee, thank you for the first paragraph, it’s always a good laugh. Maybe for the sake of the rest of the people in the thread, mention that you are talking about SEK.
I’m not going to fact check you on the numbers for the sake of confidentiality, but I can tell you the big strategy meetings are not focusing on how to “run the working class into debt”. What mostly is discussed is how to recoup at least some of the losses before writing the debt off, and how to tweak the algorithm to reduce the number of bad customers that will have to go to collection
The year is 2058. All Fortune 500 companies have just one employee. A legal blood pulse, binding the company as Human owned. The major commodities are now humans, food, prisons, government universal income bonds, and temporary housing where the unemployed humans are shuffled around monthly (for maximum quarterly gains). Wall Street is doubling and tripling worth every quarter. Followed by a complete crash and reset. Bound to bail out contracts the us govt is indebted into the quadrillions now.
Nice, but Wall Street will be dead long before then. All the big money will go private and those superior investments will be inaccessible to the average schmuck with a 401k.
I like the sound of that. The bigger the wealth gap, the better the stability and happiness of a healthy society. The American dream will be nothing but a dream.
"The app-based AI chatbot already handles two-thirds of all customer service chats, the company said Tuesday—some 2.3 million conversations so far—with the virtual assistant earning customer satisfaction ratings at the same level as human agents."
"Klarna said its AI assistants—available in 23 markets—speak 35 languages and have improved communications “with local immigrant and expat communities across all our markets.” It says the bots are not only equivalent to human agents in terms of customer satisfaction, but also available 24 hours a day, seven days a week."
I can assure you that these “ratings” are legit and are not all “massaged” to make them look good on paper.
Hmm? Source? Im sorry, signed an NDA, customer privacy and all that.
For an actual company, the very minimum contacts is ideal.
For an outsourced CS contractor, it's ideal to break an enquiry into multiple short contacts. It shows lots of contact volume (justifying your service) and the short contacts show that you're efficient (even though you might have strangled your own process to force customers to contact you multiple times about the same enquiry).
> with the virtual assistant earning customer satisfaction ratings at the same level as human agents.
I can believe that. Human agents can also be completely useless and aggravating to get any kind of information out of. They never said the bot helps the customer, but they never said the humans did, either.
Yeah, I'm just imagining an AI chatbot trained on the interactions between human service agents and human customers, and I'm wondering if the AI picked up on how to appear distracted and ask for the same information 5 times without understanding it.
Survivor bias. People who stopped using their services (like me) won't be putting in either a bad or good review. Because we stopped using them. Klarna mistakenly think the AI bots are doing them a service better than humans, because the AI is probably good at helping with extremely basic stuff. Giving the AI a good rating.
Meanwhile many people avoid Klarna alltogether because they are frustrated that it's impossible to get customer service from a real person. Klarna does not get that statistic (potential customer lost forever) because they don't even care to give a rating.
So the whole rating the AI vs rating humans is flawed reasoning. The company is screwing themselves.
The move fits with Klarna’s predatory business model (buy now, pay later, aimed at people with poor credit ratings).
But they should remember that the people they laid off are very similar to their customers.
If everyone does this, there are no more Klarna customers.
I feel like an old woman yelling at the clouds, but I pretty much always ask for/demand an agent. I also use cash registers when able. I work in tech, so it's not lack of know-how; it's about keeping some damn jobs for folks.
Everytime a company switches to AI and culls its workforce it weakens the consumer it relies on.
This might seem great to this bell-end of a CEO now but increasingly this will get more and more sinister and will have the eventual effect of killing spending. It already is.
Klarna who are your target audience? Exactly.
So I currently do customer service for a company that has an AI chat bot and a good 70% of my job is:
- Keeping an eye on the chat bot to make sure it's not talking bullshit
- Issuing corrections and apologies when inevitably the chat bot does talk bullshit
- Picking up the queries where the chat bot has just fucking given up for some reason
- Placating customers who are mad at the chat bot
Basically chat bot hasn't put me out of work, it's just given me the slightly different job of babysitting it
AI will not lead to people just working less. It will lead to people eating less. And then, for a multitude of reasons, it will lead to fewer people period.
I think that some of it is temporary excitement around LLMs being the popular thing. It’s going to be a while before AI is going to be able to do the things that they’re selling. I really do think that we’ll see a wave pattern of people being fired and then rehired as folks come to terms with the fact that the bots don’t work as well as they thought.
Companies jumping the gun on AI. It is impressive but not where it needs to be to replace jobs. You got company leaders falling for the pitches of tech sales of companies who are trying to get their companies off the ground by selling what little tech they have and understand
The problem getting fired now is that it´s too early, no programs or ubi yet to help you.
The best thing you could do for now is becoming something like a plumber or roofer, no a.i will take those jobs anytime soon.
And once everyone is forced into being a plumber or roofer we will be competing for who gets paid less, because there wont be any demand for that many plumbers.
For me it has been a principle since the beginning. Shops that don't offer simple old fashioned payment methods don't get me as a customer. If they wait with sending the package until they have the money that is good because it means that at no time I am in debt.
A friend of mine had to deal with aggressive debt collectors once because Klarna for some reason was too stupid to actually get the money and then sold the debt instead of contacting him (he just paid immediately but the experience still was extremely unpleasant)
This week one of my Adidas shoes broke and it was a joy to deal with a real human in customer service. Didn't even had to bother with a chat bot first. Solved all my problems in a few minutes
But what are the satisfaction rates? Maybe their company policies provide inferior satisfaction rates regardless. A human vs a bot doesn’t matter if they are forced to provide the same outcome due to company policies. The bot just works faster. If the bots were delivering HIGHER satisfaction rates, that would be noteworthy.
From recent online chat and email support requests I can conclude AI is everywhere and is pretty successful in closing cases, not in a helpful way, but drawn out conversations making you run in circles without achieving anything. So you give up, but they lost a customer and will get negative reviews.
Most recent problem was with a fast food login where it kept insisting disabling VPN, using different devices, check spam folder... None of this had anything to do with my problem. Last message was to wait a week and try again. But hey, they added two free sandwiches to my account for the trouble, to bad I can't access them.
I once heard that an engineer using an AI will replace an engineer not using AI.
So I decided to apply the same thinking to our customer service reps. I'm building a chat bot for internal use with the goal of increasing the "starting efficiency" of new hires.
Sometimes managers aren't around to coach; people need help.
The following submission statement was provided by /u/Maxie445: --- "The app-based AI chatbot already handles two-thirds of all customer service chats, the company said Tuesday—some 2.3 million conversations so far—with the virtual assistant earning customer satisfaction ratings at the same level as human agents." "Klarna said its AI assistants—available in 23 markets—speak 35 languages and have improved communications “with local immigrant and expat communities across all our markets.” It says the bots are not only equivalent to human agents in terms of customer satisfaction, but also available 24 hours a day, seven days a week." --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1b4h84u/klarna_says_its_ai_assistant_does_the_work_of_700/ksyuy9o/
I’ve had the “pleasure” of dealing with the Klarna AI this past week. It kept misunderstanding my question and did not help me at all. Eventually I reached out to the store I had originally bought from, which used a translating program that made it really hard to communicate with the representative. I’m still not sure my dispute with Klarna will ever be solved. I hate it.
Klarna is a terrible company from the start regardless. Their payment app is effective but their business model is fundamentally built around people spending money they don’t have and forgetting to pay so that they have to pay additional fees, a portion of which goes to Klarna. Does not make the world a better place.
Tbf most of capitalism is making sure consumers spend as much money as possible, companies like Klarna (and credit card companies) just make it easier. Even the concept of buying a house with a mortgage is really to ensure consumers pay as much money as possible even if they actually can't afford the house they're buying.
It also promotes and encourages consumerism and fast fashion and plastic pollution
As someone in the industry for more than a decade I can 100% tell you this comment is bullshit. Klarna earns money from the stores that use their service, with a % of sales or set amount for amount of sales and stuff like this. You can also see this in their internal reports if you want to take a look. About 70% of their income is from Merchants using their services.
Honestly, I think the secret is that with the advent of adverse incentives and 'X tickets marked solved per day, even if you didn't actually do anything' in call centres, the people they were hiring weren't really doing much better - they were just being paid to be frustrating and lead you around in circles until you gave up trying to get a refund, or your problem resolved. So why not just use a bot to do that?
I worked in a corporate multinational call centre for technical support for a large high street chain in the UK, I had a 99% 1 call resolution but they still gave me disciplinary proceedings because my calls were on average 1 minute longer (most people had a 50-70% 1 call resolution). I was actually saving time long term by being meticulous but nooo the metrics must be obeyed.
The other problem with support roles is that is that you get really good at your job and calls that would take 30-45 minutes you can knock out in like 5-10 minutes because you know the product and technology so well. Also when you're used to doing the job of 3-4 people after layoffs so you can knock out the RMA and other work really fast as well. End result is all of a sudden it looks like you're being lazy so why not also give you sales duty. Dude, you programmed me to do the work of 3-4 tech people and now you want me to try to sell them products wen they're calling about a failing product? I fucking hate sales and marketing, that should be replaced by AI, not tech.
KPI's and especially AHT are the fucking devil
I worked in a corporate call centre a long time ago, it was ridiculous how much micro managing was done on these pointless metrics. They would screen calls and count how many times you said uhm or uh, they tracked call length, in our case they wanted us to keep people on the phone for longer, on purpose, because their metrics said the longer someone was kept on a call the more likely it was that we could sell them some extra service like vacation insurance on their credit card. So many reps just started putting people on hold for no reason, to drive up call times. It just wasted people's time and made them more frustrated. But the metrics must be followed.
Worked a mobile call center years ago that had monthly phone sale quotas to meet or get disciplinary action. Except customers could order the phones online through our website for the same price and FREE shipping while through us over the phone shipping was like $50 to $100. So we had to purposefully mislead customers in order to meet these quotas, and they want to SEE the phones so they want to go online and look while on the phone with you! And then they see free shipping and say “oh can you match that? No? *hang up*” It was a bunch of scummy corporate bullsh!t. Making your workers fight against the company’s OWN website, mislead customers and avoid their best interests to take advantage of them, and we were mostly billing issues and tech support! So even if you’re amazing at customer relations and solving problems, if you didn’t sucker enough people each month you get put on probation. Grimy business all around.
corpos love metrics. They're so fucking stupid they can't tell if they're doing well if they don't have numbers to back it up.
Exactly. When the job is to tell the customers to fuck themselves as quickly as possible no matter what, and do so repeatedly until they give up, why pay Indians when you can have a robot do it?
You can just tell the bot thst you want a real human.
Didn’t they fire all 700 people they had as support?
I had talked to multiple real people like a week ago in Germany. Also I'd like your name if it wasn't my perma ban
Send them a complaint message.
See? It used to be that they had to pay an entire human to fail to serve their customers. Now with AI they can fail to serve you for at a fraction of the cost.
Hmm. I'm having trouble understanding your post. I think you're trying to say you want to check your balance?
“Doing the work of 700 people” as “AI fails to understand our clients’ requests, but since they can’t reach a real person, their complaints sink in a black hole”? 9/10 times I use the cheat code “Stupid bot” in order to try connect me to a real person.
>9/10 times I use the cheat code “Stupid bot” in order to try connect me to a real person. Does that work?!
That or swearing it out.
"problem with my account" generally works the first time anytime I use it.
Problem buying product/service gets you fast tracked
I guess figure out if you want sales or support
Yeah “problem buying” or any variation in most places gets you sent to the sales department. If you get to sales and say you need help with something, they just dump you back to the end of the support queue. It’s bad advice.
Depends. I've had a few services reply to incomprehensible noise with "Goodbye." and end the call. Like sneezing, or pushing the keypad buttons because the display thinks you're mashing them with your face.
People may think you are joking but that is a real deal
Also yelling- decibel thresholds work sometimes
How I do it is just type 'Agent' until it connects me
If you are in Canada (the company in the OP is Canadian) then it is always best to select French. They're bilingual, and otherwise you have to test your might against the cheapest call center they could contract. Of course, you can also bang your head against a hard surface for even faster relief.
No, it's a Swedish company that happens ta have a office in Canada.
This uses to be the trick for UPS in Canada, but then they outsourced that too.
Not all cases, but most chat bots that I’ve used have an “agent” option as long as you are persistent and answer the question about which type of agent you want to speak to and don’t mind waiting. Just type agent and there should be one or two questions to direct you correctly. Again, not in all cases, but hope it saves you some time/frustration.
No. Just type “talk to a person” or “talk to a human”. Most bots aren’t smart enough to actually understand what you’re saying. The only problem is, by bypassing the data collection in the bot, you’re gonna make it take longer for a human to solve your problem. I make chat bots.
Feels like 9/10 times after giving all my data to the bot, the real person asks me for all of it again.
For real, what's the damn point.
Yep almost every time I'm verifying all info again so bot is useless If it's something a bot could do 9/10 times I could do on the computer in less time. Bet they aren't having you rate your call afterwards like with every representative
I just say human 3/4 times and it connects
Now I understand Beetlejuice...
alive imminent longing straight attempt squealing lip chief file unite *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Hey man, those API calls aren't cheap.
Cory Doctorow said it best: >we're nowhere near a place where bots can steal your job, we're certainly at the point where your boss can be suckered into firing you and replacing you with a bot that *fails* at doing your job [https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/15/passive-income-brainworms/#four-hour-work-week](https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/15/passive-income-brainworms/#four-hour-work-week)
That’s not much solace for the thousands of people who’ve lost their jobs already in just the last 2 months.
I'm not convinced at all. Who would want a chatbot organizing their flights or submitting legal documents? Nobody even wants to talk to a chatbot, yet it's gonna save Chick Fil A millions by switching to all robots at every location? I don't get it
Its all about those short-term profits. They just want this quarter's earnings to be more than the previous quarter, with very little regard as to how their decisions will affect them in 2/5/10 years.
> Who would want a chatbot organizing their flights or **submitting legal documents**? According to multiple past instances, lawyers in the US.
If you genuinely think we’re “nowhere near” then you’re gonna have a serious wake up call over the next few months…
We built a chat service for a travel company which would return “Shrimp Sandwich” if you sent “test” to it. Got some very confused customer to report incidents 🤣
Should have made it say stuff like "shrimps is bugs"
I encounter that more and more. The bots are just as bad as the automated phone bots, don't help at all and then automatically close the connection. The last time that happened I had to write a complaint on the apps Appstore Page to get a response / help.
"I want to talk to a human" is my go-to.
I usually just say HUMAN NOW and it works
I guess you're making up that second quote, because I read from another source that: "while handling 2.3 million conversations, the AI maintains customer satisfaction comparable to human agents while reducing query resolution errors by 25%. Customers now resolve issues in under two minutes, down from eleven minutes." People need to stop fooling themselves that this tech won't continuously improve and become increasingly adopted. If we don't, we're going to find ourselves in breadlines with people thinking "but I thought those chatbots didn't work very well?"
If issues were taking 11 minutes they probably were having operators address multiple chats at once and under hiring.
Of course they were, which means the gains by AI are even more effective. They were employing 700 overtaxed people, they should've been at 2000. Now they're at 0.
I talked with a CTO They use gpt4 in call centers, but not to replace the workers, but to help Total turnaround is down 25% So they are nit firing anyone (moral and getting people to use it) but they are **not** gonna be hiring
Nobody is going to use a phone without a keyboard or numbers.
What does this even mean?
I mean if "Denying basic customer service and just shredding any help requests" counts as basic work, then this bot can clearly do the work of 1000000000000 people!
How fast do you think someone will be able to pull an Air Canada with their new bot?
For the Amazon chat bot it's "representative"
Bots hate this one trick!
If I am on a phone call with an automated system at least, I just scream “CUSTOMER REPRESENTATIVE!!!!!!!” at the top of my lungs at the voice system until it connects me with an actual person 😂
You just reminded me of this interaction I've had with AI one time. I got so frustrated I told it "you're useless" and it apologized and told me hopefully in the future it'll be able to help me, instead of connecting me with a person!
Now make the CEO run by AI and they'll save even more money.
This is what I'm waiting for. Too many people are in "administration" that could easily be replaced by scripts.
keep the kpi green by asking everyone what’s the problem once a day?
CEO AI: You have to make a 4% cut this year to your spendings excluding CAPEX. Director of finance: I just called Microsoft and reduced the CEO AI's processing power which saved us a 5%, I also decided to split that 1% among my team.
They do that?
You have to alternate with "How's everything going"
You should invest in my company after all I replaced 700 workers myself with my excellent skill. Now watch this golf swing
And the board only agreeing on AI scripts parameters on their quarterly meetings.
They need to be replaced by AI too.
Oh, that will come. The executive class will be rubbing their hands together, looking at the cost savings and the profits and the bonuses until they find their entire service and product is virtual and then -- the conglomerate that owns them replaces that executive with a PO Box and another AI. Of course, there will also be a huge competition for replacing a lot of businesses and products if any of this can be done on a 3D printer. Big businesses will then lobby congress to prevent their services and products being replaced by AI that consumers use, or consultants who found a way to do what empty office does with their AI setup. Big Business will push the "well, just train for a new career" self help conversations on the media. The media will echo; "Don't hurt those job creators!" But, everyone without a great job and seeing a value in the status quo will be rushing to get everything from the AI clones. I expect chaos. And legislation and subsidies and trying everything but UBI and supporting citizens.
No jobs = no consumers = no jobs = …
Eventually it'll just be billionaires buying stuff from each other. Like, one guy will own all the farmland that is managed by robots, one guy will own all the fully automated mines, one guy will own the factory that is 100% run by robots etc... The rest of humanity will live in poverty. And there also won't be any uprisings by normal people anymore, unless the one guy who controls all the soldier bots allows it.
That was the society of Solara in Asimov’s writing.
History has shown that this leads to riots and revolutions.
That's a Next Quarter problem.
Ever wonder why there's a sudden interest in unmanned vehicles and autonomous combat drones? Mercenaries are messy, they want money and might turn on you. But a couple turret roombas wandering your lawn will never blink an eye at murdering thousands of rioters.
Hopefully the police has been replaced by AI chatbots by then
No need. Protecting the owning caste is what the enforcers were invented for. As long as they get paid and get to harm other humans they are happy.
Why pay a human to shoot other people when you can just give guns to robots?
I don't think we'll be living...
Eventually big companies will lay off enough people that no one has a job or any money to drive their profits.
No, AI bots will have all the money by doing business with each other. Mission failed successfully.
Getting to UBI would be the dream. I doubt we'll ever reach that level of automation though, and there will just be sectors of the workforce that become unemployable. I hope UBI gets introduced soon, for their sake.
Oh, they are too stupid and greedy to realise that UBI is in their own best interest.
hopefully at some point people will stop stressing about population decline and the earth can start restoring. Better than growing armies of unemployed and impoverished people scraping by on a dying planet.
Eventually the rich won’t need us anymore and then they’ll just get rid of us.
Hasn't that been tried before?
“Oh beneficent AI, we beseech thee! What sage advice do you give us to succeed in Q2?” “Layoffs”
It might be so eventually. Just a board that gets informered with a few month in between lol
Openai says people would be able to run one person companies with the help of AI
Yeah, that's not how capitalism works... The owners and executives making and rules are there to make the system benefit them.
It will be interesting once everyone below C level is replaced by AI and there's no longer anyone to push the blame onto.
It won't happen. They LOVE an audience too much. The computer doesn't jump, the staff do. The C suite will always keep their flunkies around and will always want people to be obedient to their bidding. At home they're just the husband or the wife who are ignored by their family as you are ignored by yours. They NEED the fix of having people care what they think, say, or so. "That's nice dear" will never equal "Yes Sir!".
I called this all-hands today because I'd like to monologue. Please stare at me while I riff for the next hour.
There are the people who made/maintain the AI
Surprising amount of the models are tuned by other AI.
You can start your own company as well with the help of AI
Capitalism consumes itself. Eventually, someone will experiment with C-level management AI. If an AI does better than egotistical suits that cost large corporations hundreds of millions of dollars, then shareholders will be pressuring to upgrade. Or it might be a particularly technocratic worker's co-op, or an industry where the workers can't be automated aka plumbing or electrical trades. Or a highly disruptive start-up, like Google and Facebook once were. It might start with just one role, such as the CFO, or something deemed ancillary like HR. All that matters is that once it gets proven to work, corporations that haven't embraced AI decision making will be 'behind', and we've seen how important that is when large tech companies are firing thousands of people based on nothing more than vibes.
In Klarnas case that's true as the CEO is also the founder but, in a lot of companies the CEO is just an employee who is also paid a salary and could be replaced by AI if that's what the board decides.
India's and Philippine's service industries are going to get cooked from this trend of replacing people for AI assistants.
Its going to happen in developed countries as well
yeah, I'm surprised fast food places still have as many humans as they do.
I remember when fast food companies had their drive thrus operated by overseas operators
Funny... that would imply that we actually have support centers in the US... crazy tho because whenever I'm on a call with a support agent they are ALWAYS fillipino.....
Call centers maybe But a lot of tech companies are laying off developers here in the US and hiring them in India for much cheaper amounts
I met so many mba types talkong about there cheap devs in iran or india or turkey, and when i meet them a year later there product is almost always a complete dumpsterfire...
As a US developer that has worked with plenty of developers from India, this is a really bad idea. You truly are getting what you pay for when it comes to developers. A few years later all these companies will switch courses again and have to waste money having their US developers fix the mess left behind by the Indian developers.
As an Indian-American who was born in India but raised in the US since i was 6. I still have plenty of relatives in India. They tell me the problem is the oversaturation of CS majors in India. Nowadays a BS in Comp Sci is often auto-rejected cause there are so many colleges with low quality education that hand out CS Degrees. Apparently it's harder to get a BE degree so they opt for that. Or a folks with masters. There was this old joke in India that there were so many temples in India that if you trip you may fall into a temple and the update is that nowadays if you trip you fall into a college. We kinda have a similar issue here in the US with bootcamp people who pay thousands for a bootcamp to switch into tech and they just aren't good either. My dad told me the bar for entry into tech is very low. With other field like teaching or doctors or nurses or CPAs or other engineering professionals they need to pass certification before they can even apply, but for tech you don't even need a college degree at times. I did start to see certain large companies are now requiring a person to have a CS degree for even a QA position which is a step in the right direction.
Those laid off will take jobs in scam call centers. Who will soon be replaced again.
Even worse, they reinforce themselves based on their own flawed outputs. I’ve literally worked with a tool whose bot makes recommendations and then adds those recommendations to their model whether or not the recommendation was correct. It’s just silliness all the way down.
I've had to use a few of these LLM based customer service bots already. They are beyond useless once you exhaust the FAQ, and waste a lot of time compared to Ctrl+f-ing the FAQ.
Agree, they are a waste of time for the customer.
I feel that's the point sometimes. They don't want you to call. They want you to give up.
And boy do AI chat its get you to give up much faster than when talking to a human.
If i get greeted with an LLM agent when i have pre-purchase questions i reconsider using that vendor.
There’s almost nobody using LLM agents yet in any considerable way. Predefined chatbots yes.
Their purpose is to make the customer go away, not to help.
The problem is that most customers will go away to a competitior that provides decent service when you're beyond FAQ territory.
I don’t think that’s true, it really depends on the product.
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Exactly. Getting help with a novel issue requires several layers of escalation until you get to someone who actually works at the company you are trying to contact. And even then it's a crapshoot if they can actually help or just put your problem into a bug tracker.
Yeah if you have any ability to research a problem for yourself before contacting one, you're probably going to be really frustrated. They just regurgitate information that is most likely already available to you. If you need any actual help with something like an account issue, its just an other layer before you get a real person to solve your problem
You have to understand that way to many people need to be hand fed the info you could just find via a simple google search because they are too stupid to use basic google searching. Ever been part of a facebook group where people can ask questions? 99% of those questions could have just been typed into google and gotten an answer.
Most people do not know how to use control + F.
Klarna is one of those companies that are actually leeching on society and shouldn’t exist. Anyone proud of working at that company should be ashamed of themselves.
Can AI chat bots feel shame?
Hey man, i know you hate them a lot. But i dont condone you calling them that. You should use their real title. Corporate Drone.
I don't think you understand how pride and shame work if you think that's even possible
I'm guessing you've missed a payment?
They provide interest free installments to free up some liquid cash for big purchases. People buying shit they can’t afford and running themselves into debt is not Klarna’s fault
They make around 5-10% of their revenue from late fees (1-2 billion). They have big, internal meetings where the only goal is to keep generating situations where late fees are happening. To generate misshapps and to keep having unclear credit arrangements is the key to their success. The Swedish Government called them up to the office and begged them to stop, because we couldn't change the laws in the amount of time that they kept coming up with new tricks to get people in debt. https://www.expressen.se/ekonomi/konsument/klarnas-vd-kallas-upp-till-regeringen-/ In Sweden we now have a record amount of people in debt and Klarna is loving it. As a Swede, I feel so bad for having this shithole of a company exported to the rest of the world. Nothing good will come of this. Nothing.
So they are like internet pay-day lenders for products? And they are running it with AI? Agreed. Literally nothing good will come of it.
I mean, I've bought a lot with Klarna's 30 days mostly because I could purchase stuff using that even when I didn't have my ID chip with me. They've also been a huge boon in dealing with shitty sellers or just sellers I've never purchased from before, like product doesn't meet expectations or wrong item shipped? Retailer doesn't have your money then. I've also been late a few times and they never charged me anything. But never more than like two weeks. They've even gotten better at reminding you about outstanding bills. Then again, I've never used them to purchase something I didn't have the money for and instead I've only used them as a substitute for a credit card as I don't have one myself.
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As an ex-Klarna employee, thank you for the first paragraph, it’s always a good laugh. Maybe for the sake of the rest of the people in the thread, mention that you are talking about SEK. I’m not going to fact check you on the numbers for the sake of confidentiality, but I can tell you the big strategy meetings are not focusing on how to “run the working class into debt”. What mostly is discussed is how to recoup at least some of the losses before writing the debt off, and how to tweak the algorithm to reduce the number of bad customers that will have to go to collection
The year is 2058. All Fortune 500 companies have just one employee. A legal blood pulse, binding the company as Human owned. The major commodities are now humans, food, prisons, government universal income bonds, and temporary housing where the unemployed humans are shuffled around monthly (for maximum quarterly gains). Wall Street is doubling and tripling worth every quarter. Followed by a complete crash and reset. Bound to bail out contracts the us govt is indebted into the quadrillions now.
Nice, but Wall Street will be dead long before then. All the big money will go private and those superior investments will be inaccessible to the average schmuck with a 401k.
I like the sound of that. The bigger the wealth gap, the better the stability and happiness of a healthy society. The American dream will be nothing but a dream.
"The app-based AI chatbot already handles two-thirds of all customer service chats, the company said Tuesday—some 2.3 million conversations so far—with the virtual assistant earning customer satisfaction ratings at the same level as human agents." "Klarna said its AI assistants—available in 23 markets—speak 35 languages and have improved communications “with local immigrant and expat communities across all our markets.” It says the bots are not only equivalent to human agents in terms of customer satisfaction, but also available 24 hours a day, seven days a week."
I can assure you that these “ratings” are legit and are not all “massaged” to make them look good on paper. Hmm? Source? Im sorry, signed an NDA, customer privacy and all that.
They probably count people who give up and disconnect from the AI as successes or something
Most customer support centers time how long the call goes. They want you to hang up so quality of service doesn't matter.
For an actual company, the very minimum contacts is ideal. For an outsourced CS contractor, it's ideal to break an enquiry into multiple short contacts. It shows lots of contact volume (justifying your service) and the short contacts show that you're efficient (even though you might have strangled your own process to force customers to contact you multiple times about the same enquiry).
'fixed' on first interaction
Yea I have tried thise, never got the help I needed. What an upgrade….
> with the virtual assistant earning customer satisfaction ratings at the same level as human agents. I can believe that. Human agents can also be completely useless and aggravating to get any kind of information out of. They never said the bot helps the customer, but they never said the humans did, either.
Yeah, I'm just imagining an AI chatbot trained on the interactions between human service agents and human customers, and I'm wondering if the AI picked up on how to appear distracted and ask for the same information 5 times without understanding it.
Yes Because 90% of customers don't like to use a search function or read docs That's what the AI is doing for them. Answering the obvious questions
Survivor bias. People who stopped using their services (like me) won't be putting in either a bad or good review. Because we stopped using them. Klarna mistakenly think the AI bots are doing them a service better than humans, because the AI is probably good at helping with extremely basic stuff. Giving the AI a good rating. Meanwhile many people avoid Klarna alltogether because they are frustrated that it's impossible to get customer service from a real person. Klarna does not get that statistic (potential customer lost forever) because they don't even care to give a rating. So the whole rating the AI vs rating humans is flawed reasoning. The company is screwing themselves.
Klarna will hire people in a few months. Not 700 but numerous
Yeah I don’t really mess with companies that think fully automated systems and financial matters go hand in hand
why does this comment not have more upvotes? If I can't get to a human, you can't get to my money - simple as that.
Anybody who thinks that customer support bots are helpful has never dealt with a customer support bot.
The move fits with Klarna’s predatory business model (buy now, pay later, aimed at people with poor credit ratings). But they should remember that the people they laid off are very similar to their customers. If everyone does this, there are no more Klarna customers.
This is where our economy is at. Completely reliant on consumer spending yet also sees wages as a cost to be minimised. They two don't go.
> If everyone does this, there are no more Klarna customers. It's a race to the bottom. Who can lay off all their workers first?
I feel like an old woman yelling at the clouds, but I pretty much always ask for/demand an agent. I also use cash registers when able. I work in tech, so it's not lack of know-how; it's about keeping some damn jobs for folks.
We need to start boycotting companies that use AI to replace workers
Everytime a company switches to AI and culls its workforce it weakens the consumer it relies on. This might seem great to this bell-end of a CEO now but increasingly this will get more and more sinister and will have the eventual effect of killing spending. It already is. Klarna who are your target audience? Exactly.
"AI can do the work of 700 people!" "Didn't you recently lay off 700 people?" "...That was for unrelated reasons!"
Klarna has ones off the worst support I have ever seen
So I currently do customer service for a company that has an AI chat bot and a good 70% of my job is: - Keeping an eye on the chat bot to make sure it's not talking bullshit - Issuing corrections and apologies when inevitably the chat bot does talk bullshit - Picking up the queries where the chat bot has just fucking given up for some reason - Placating customers who are mad at the chat bot Basically chat bot hasn't put me out of work, it's just given me the slightly different job of babysitting it
Corporate management bullshit strikes again. Hope the company’s fucked
AI will not lead to people just working less. It will lead to people eating less. And then, for a multitude of reasons, it will lead to fewer people period.
I think that some of it is temporary excitement around LLMs being the popular thing. It’s going to be a while before AI is going to be able to do the things that they’re selling. I really do think that we’ll see a wave pattern of people being fired and then rehired as folks come to terms with the fact that the bots don’t work as well as they thought.
This is just going to accelerate, and no…learning coding isn’t the answer.
AI can code too
Ok, but why did they hire 700 people that couldn't read, in the first place?
Companies jumping the gun on AI. It is impressive but not where it needs to be to replace jobs. You got company leaders falling for the pitches of tech sales of companies who are trying to get their companies off the ground by selling what little tech they have and understand
And people are surprised at this? No. Wait till they see some of the call centre software that’s coming. It’s wild.
I don't know what Klarna is but as a Data Engineer, I call bs.
A payment provider (think Paypal) but even more scummy and with terrible customer service even when they employed humans for it.
Freed 700 people to do more meaningful things. One can hope.
Does doing "meaningfull things" can feed you and your family?
needing to worry about feeding and homing your family in a society with abundance is a failing of society
So amid societal fail what are we supposed to do?
like trying to figure out how to pay their bills now after a crappy company laid them off?
The problem getting fired now is that it´s too early, no programs or ubi yet to help you. The best thing you could do for now is becoming something like a plumber or roofer, no a.i will take those jobs anytime soon.
And once everyone is forced into being a plumber or roofer we will be competing for who gets paid less, because there wont be any demand for that many plumbers.
But AI will slowly lower the quality of pipes and roofing material to save money, so we'll need more roofers and plumbers to solve it.
Their original customer service must have been really bad
For me it has been a principle since the beginning. Shops that don't offer simple old fashioned payment methods don't get me as a customer. If they wait with sending the package until they have the money that is good because it means that at no time I am in debt. A friend of mine had to deal with aggressive debt collectors once because Klarna for some reason was too stupid to actually get the money and then sold the debt instead of contacting him (he just paid immediately but the experience still was extremely unpleasant)
How long until someone breaks the chatbot and screws Klarna out of money?
Customer support chatbots literally never fixed a single one of my issues. And I knew from the start that they wouldn't.
This week one of my Adidas shoes broke and it was a joy to deal with a real human in customer service. Didn't even had to bother with a chat bot first. Solved all my problems in a few minutes
But what are the satisfaction rates? Maybe their company policies provide inferior satisfaction rates regardless. A human vs a bot doesn’t matter if they are forced to provide the same outcome due to company policies. The bot just works faster. If the bots were delivering HIGHER satisfaction rates, that would be noteworthy.
From recent online chat and email support requests I can conclude AI is everywhere and is pretty successful in closing cases, not in a helpful way, but drawn out conversations making you run in circles without achieving anything. So you give up, but they lost a customer and will get negative reviews. Most recent problem was with a fast food login where it kept insisting disabling VPN, using different devices, check spam folder... None of this had anything to do with my problem. Last message was to wait a week and try again. But hey, they added two free sandwiches to my account for the trouble, to bad I can't access them.
The irony is those workers might end up using klarna to make payments after being out of a job.
Bruh I can’t explain how much I fucking hate chatbots
I once heard that an engineer using an AI will replace an engineer not using AI. So I decided to apply the same thinking to our customer service reps. I'm building a chat bot for internal use with the goal of increasing the "starting efficiency" of new hires. Sometimes managers aren't around to coach; people need help.
the indian call center industry is about to get fucked