Why the fuck can’t I just speak to a real person?
Earlier this year, I ordered something from Amazon and received somebody else’s package instead. It wasn’t anything I wanted, so I did the right thing and dropped it off at the correct address, which thankfully was only a little ways down the street. My own package, however, never showed up. No big deal, I figured. I’ll just contact Amazon customer service and tell them what happened.
Except you can’t just contact Amazon customer service anymore.
Standing guard over the gates was Rufus, Amazon’s AI chatbot, which has since been replaced by the equally shitty Alexa for Shopping. I spent close to ten minutes trying to explain that I had received somebody else’s order and never received my own, while Rufus repeatedly tried to funnel me through whatever automated process Amazon thought would make me go away. I kept telling it that I wanted to speak to a person. Rufus kept pretending that wasn’t an option until I finally managed to phrase my request in whatever magical combination of words caused the gates to open and granted me an audience with an actual customer service representative.
At least I think it was an actual customer service representative. Who the hell knows anymore?
Customer service has become a war of attrition. Companies don’t seem particularly interested in solving your problem, they seem interested in making the process annoying enough that you eventually decide the $20 or $50 or whatever you lost isn’t worth spending another hour fighting with their system. Luckily for me, I’m angry and spiteful enough to win this war about 99% of the time. If you make me fight through six menus, three chatbots, a phone tree, and a CAPTCHA before I can talk to somebody, I’ll do it purely out of principle.
That remaining 1% belongs to Rockstar Games.
A while back, I grabbed Red Dead Redemption 2 during a Steam sale. Of course, because this is Rockstar, buying the fucking game through Steam wasn’t enough. You can’t just install the game you purchased and play it like some kind of primitive caveman living in 2007. You have to link your Steam account to your Rockstar account, verify everything, perform several ceremonial rites, recite the Magna Carta from memory, locate the Ark of the Covenant, and complete whatever other bullshit Rockstar decides is necessary before you’re permitted to play the video game you already paid for.
Apparently, at some point before this, somebody had stolen my Rockstar account and changed the email address attached to it. I hadn’t noticed because I wasn’t actively playing any Rockstar games at the time. Unfortunately, when I went to play Red Dead Redemption 2, I discovered that I was now locked out of my Rockstar account. That also meant I was locked out of GTA V and every other Rockstar game I had accumulated over the years.
So I contacted Rockstar support and explained what happened.
What followed was four days of going back and forth with what appeared to be automated support pretending to be a series of human customer service representatives. I really wish I’d saved the emails because they would have been perfect for this article. Every response had a different person’s name attached to it, but the answers felt exactly the same. They were generic, barely related to what I had written, and repeatedly offered solutions that required me to access the email address currently attached to the account.
You know, the email address belonging to the asshole who stole the account.
I would explain this again. Another support representative would appear, apparently having read absolutely none of the previous conversation, and suggest another variation of the same useless solution. I’d explain that I couldn’t access the hacker’s email address because I was, in fact, not the hacker. Then another name would show up and send me another canned response. Trying to reason with Rockstar support was like arguing with a brick wall, except at least the brick wall isn’t pretending to understand what you’re saying.
Eventually I gave up. I told Rockstar to delete the account, which created a new problem because apparently once a Steam account is linked to a Rockstar account, you can’t simply link it to another one. Fine by me. FitGirl seems to have figured out how to distribute those games without forcing people through Rockstar’s account system, for the low low price of free-ninety-nine. Interesting how Rockstar support could apparently delete my account on request, but somehow recovering it from the person who stole it was beyond their technological capabilities.
The bastard who stole my account was Russian, so I hope he later found himself on the receiving end of a Ukrainian drone strike. Steal from AJ and pay the price, motherfucker.
This happened a while ago, and I’m sure I’m misremembering some minor details. The important part hasn’t changed. A human support representative who actually read what I was saying probably could have understood the problem within five minutes. Somebody stole the account, changed the email address, and I needed Rockstar to verify that I was the original owner and restore access. Instead, I spent several days trapped in customer service purgatory until I finally got pissed off enough to walk away.
Customer service and technical support are two things that should never be completely hidden behind AI chatbots.
I don’t care how advanced AI gets. For basic shit, sure, it can be useful. If I want to know where my package is, reset a password, check store hours, or get pointed toward the right help article, a chatbot can probably handle that perfectly well. There are plenty of routine questions that don’t require tying up an employee, and using automation for those makes complete sense.
The problem starts when companies decide the chatbot should also become the bouncer.
The moment somebody has a problem that falls outside the handful of scenarios the system was designed around, there needs to be an obvious way to reach an actual person. I shouldn’t have to trick the chatbot, repeatedly type “representative,” threaten to cancel an account, or search Reddit for some secret phrase that makes the system transfer me to a human being. If I’m contacting customer support, chances are something has already gone wrong. Making me solve a fucking puzzle before I can receive help isn’t improving customer service.
It’s especially ridiculous because I’m not exactly helpless with technology. I’m pushing 40, I’ve spent most of my life screwing around with computers and the internet, and I’d consider myself at least somewhat tech savvy. Yet there I was, feeling like a complete moron while repeatedly telling Rufus that I wanted to speak to an actual person and getting nowhere. Imagine being 75 years old and trying to navigate this shit.
We’ve already made customer service frustrating enough without AI. Phone trees have been driving people insane for decades. Companies outsourced support to gigantic call centers where the employee reading from a script barely understands the product they’re supporting. Live chat added another layer where representatives juggle five customers at once and take ten minutes between replies. Now companies are looking at this already miserable system and asking how they can remove even more human beings from it.
What could possibly go wrong?
I’ve said plenty of times before that I’m not part of the “No AI” club. AI is a useful tool, and I think it’s going to become even more useful as the technology improves. I use AI myself for things on the site, mostly image generation and article meta descriptions. There are plenty of repetitive, boring, time-consuming tasks that I’ll happily hand over to a computer, and I think people who insist that AI has absolutely no legitimate use are being just as shortsighted as the companies trying to cram it into every fucking interaction.
But useful technology still needs to be used appropriately.
AI can help a customer service representative find information faster. It can summarize a long support ticket before the representative picks it up. It can handle simple requests that don’t require much thought. It can even troubleshoot basic problems before escalating the customer to somebody who knows what they’re doing. None of that requires trapping customers inside a chatbot and refusing to let them speak with a human being.
These companies don’t seem to understand that people usually aren’t contacting customer service because everything is working correctly. We’re contacting you because something fucked up. The package went missing, the account got hacked, the payment didn’t go through, the product broke, or your software decided today would be a fantastic day to stop functioning for no apparent reason.
Those are exactly the situations where rigid automated systems tend to fall apart.
Maybe AI will eventually become good enough that it can reliably handle even complicated customer service problems. Great. When that happens, I’ll happily reconsider my position. Right now, though, we’re taking technology that still routinely misunderstands context, makes assumptions, and spits out irrelevant answers, then putting it between pissed-off customers and the people who can actually fix their problems.
Customer service was already going downhill. Half-cocked AI bullshit is making it even shittier.
Give me the chatbot if you want. Let it ask what I need and see if it can solve the problem quickly. But somewhere on that fucking screen there needs to be a button that says TALK TO A PERSON, and when I click it, I should be transferred to a person.
Getting help shouldn’t require begging a chatbot, lying to an automated system, or learning prompt engineering tricks just to get a refund for a missing Amazon package. If the automated system can’t solve the problem, get it the fuck out of the way and let somebody who can take over.
Nobody wants to talk to your fucking chatbot. We just want you to fix the goddamn problem.
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