zlacker

>>hugoda+(OP)
I recently found out that there's no such thing as Anthropic support. And that made me sad, but not for reasons that you expect.

Out of all of the tech organizations, frontier labs are the one org you'd expect to be trying out cutting edge forms of support. Out of all of the different things these agents can do, surely most forms of "routine" customer support are the lowest hanging fruit?

I think it's possible for Anthropic to make the kind of experience that delights customers. Service that feels magical. Claude is such an incredible breakthrough, and I would be very interested in seeing what Anthropic can do with Claude let loose.

I also think it's essential for the anthropic platform in the long-run. And not just in the obvious ways (customer loyalty etc). I don't know if anyone has brought this up at Anthropic, but it's such a huge risk for Anthropic's long-term strategic position. They're begging corporate decision makers to ask the question, "If Anthropic doesn't trust Claude to run its support, then why should we?"

>>areofo+c8
> Out of all of the different things these agents can do, surely most forms of "routine" customer support are the lowest hanging fruit?

I come from a world where customer support is a significant expense for operations and everyone was SO excited to implement AI for this. It doesn't work particularly well and shows a profound gap between what people think working in customer service is like and how fucking hard it actually is.

Honestly, AI is better at replacing the cost of upper-middle management and executives than it is the customer service problems.

>>eighty+yc
There are some solid usecases for AI in support, like document/inquiry triage and categorization, entity extraction, even the dreaded chatbots can be made to not be frustrating, and voice as well. But these things also need to be implemented with customer support stakeholders that are on board, not just pushed down the gullet by top brass.

>>daniel+Oe
Yes but no. Do you know how many people call support in legacy industries, ignore the voice prompt, and demand to speak to a person to pay their recurring, same-cost-every-month bill? It is honestly shocking.

There are legitimate support cases that could be made better with AI but just getting to them is honestly harder than I thought when I was first exposed. It will be a while.

>>eighty+jh
Demanding a person on the phone use the website on your behalf is a great life hack, I do it all the time. Often they try to turn me away saying "you know you can do this on our website", I just explain that I found it confusing and would like help. If you're polite and pleasant, people will bend over backwards to help you out over the phone.

With "legacy industries" in particular, their websites are usually so busted with short session timeouts/etc that it's worth spending a few minutes on hold to get somebody else to do it.

>>mikkup+lv
Sorry, I disagree here. For the specific flow I'm talking about - monthly recurring payments - the UX is about as highly optimized for success as it gets. There are ways to do it via the web, on the phone with a bot, bill pay in your own bank, set it up in-store, in an app, etc.

These people don't want the thing done, they want to talk to someone on the phone. The monthly payment is an excuse to do so. I know, we did the customer research on it.

>>eighty+bw
Recurring monthly payments I set to go automatic, but setting that up in the first place I usually do through a phone call. I know some people just want somebody to talk to, same as going through the normal checkout lines at the grocery store, but I think an equally large part of this is people just wanting somebody else to do the work (using the website, or scanning groceries) for them.

>>mikkup+Vw
> but I think an equally large part of this is people just wanting somebody else to do the work (using the website, or scanning groceries) for them.

Again, this is something my firm studied. Not UX "interviews," actual behavioral studies with observation, different interventions, etc. When you're operating at utility scale there are a non-negligible number of customers who will do more work to talk to a human than to accomplish the task. It isn't about work, ease of use, or anything else - they legitimately just want to talk.

There are also some customers who will do whatever they can to avoid talking to a human, but that's a different problem than we're talking about.

But this is a digression from my main point. Most of the "easy things" AI can do for customer support are things that are already easily solved in other places, people (like you) are choosing not to use those solutions, and adding AI doesn't reduce the number of calls that make it to your customer service team, even when it is an objectively better experience that "does the work."