"AI" customer support bots are shit
The title really sums up my thoughts on this, and speaking of SumUp, they can sod right off and all. More on that shortly.
There is no place in this world for LLM-based customer support. It sucks. We all know it sucks. And yet companies keep implementing it. If the answer existed in the materials you fed to your off-the-shelf shitbot then the customer could have found it themself on your website. If someone is contacting you, they want to speak to a human being.
Serving up an LLM to your customers is, frankly, an insult. Do your metrics for support requests/resolutions also feature your general customer retention data? Because you're going to be losing customers due to the lack of respect with which you treat them. Again, more on SumUp in a moment.
Now I'm sure there are some people for whom a chat bot is somehow useful. I don't know who they are, maybe the same people who have to be told not to swim by the drain holes in reservoirs, but I'm sure they exist somewhere. But an LLM cannot be your front line of customer service because it will lose you customers.
It was always bad enough having to wait on hold for customer service call centres, only to finally be answered by one of the aforementioned reservoir swimmers reading off a script, but at least they're a human being. They can (usually) reason, they can (sometimes) learn, and they can (occasionally) relate.
SumUp, and how they lost my business
Anyway the reason I'm writing this today is because of the incompetent fuckwits over at SumUp. I was looking to swap my POS setup over to them from Square because I was annoyed at a design choice with their Square Terminal (it can't turn the screen off automatically when in paired mode, which is obviously a nonsense), but after attempting to get a straight answer from SumUp about whether their devices behave the same way and getting subjected to their ridiculous support system, they can shove it up their arse.
First, it was the weekend and their sales team isn't available. Urgh.
Second, they have no phone number, support email, or ticketing system. Ridiculous. You have two options: live chat, or request a call back.
Fine, live chat. It was supposedly with a human, but from my brief interaction perhaps not one who'd pass a Turing test. I asked if their POS devices can sleep the screen when in paired mode, and they confirmed that no they couldn't. And when I asked again, they confirmed that yes they could. Somehow less informed than when I started, I gave up.
So, request a call back. I filled out the form. Now keep in mind that this is right beside the form I filled out at 4pm on a Tuesday:
Ah ha! The expert calleth. Surprisingly quickly too, as it was only a couple of minutes after I submitted the form.
But alas, 'twas an LLM. A useless one at that - it didn't understand my query, seemingly didn't even know of the product about which I was asking (the Terminal), and refused to pass me on to a human. It's actually the first time I've been stumped by one of these automated call systems, as usually I just start swearing excessively at them until they pass me onwards, but this time it seemingly had no capability to progress your call. It was, in effect, just a chat bot with an outdated version of their own wiki. And I never did get a call back from a human.
That's just insulting to your customers - people who are, in theory, looking to pay you money.
I was so annoyed, in fact, that I immediately submitted a closure request for my new SumUp account. And I will make sure to tell anyone else who asks for small business POS recommendations that their support system is bullshit and to go elsewhere. I run my vintage camera stall in a multi-tenant antiques market, and so over time that will be numerous potential new users that SumUp will have lost due to their disdain for their own customers.
And hey, Square's Terminal may need a screen replacement within a year due to burnout, but at least they have both email and phone support. Which up until now I had just kinda taken for granted, but as we all slide towards a stock-market-driven chatbot hellscape I'll take any small wins I can get.