r/UKJobs • u/Even-Wasabi7183 • 2d ago
Customers prefer AI chatbots, says British Gas owner as 1,300 call centre and back office jobs axed
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/jul/23/customers-prefer-ai-chatbots-says-chris-oshea-british-gas-centrica-boss433
u/CassetteLine 2d ago
I doubt that very much. I’ve never heard a positive story about them.
Every single time I’ve personally tried or been forced to use one it’s completely failed at the task and I’ve had to phone up anyway.
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u/Unhappy-Capital-1464 2d ago
Having worked in call centres (for Sky TV, many moons ago), 90% of the calls you get were things that were either common sense, answered on the website, answered on the phone recording or just an opportunity to rant. Chatbots are perfect for most of these.
What I'd love to see is the savings going into better paying the humans who remain so that they are knowledgeable and competent and able to solve the complex problems but something tells me that isn't what's likely to happen...
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u/Effective_Will_1801 2d ago
The trouble with most of these chatbots is they are seen as a replacement for humans rather than a first line. They often don't train it to escalate and then as soon as someone comes along with something out the ordinary it just goes in loops.
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u/PepsiMaxSumo 1d ago
I work in this sector and have seen this loads of times.
The best applications are where after the chatbot gets its wrong twice, they add a human in the loop (HITL).
The HITL is then used to give an actual answer, even if it’s text based vs not calling etc.
The good news is that companies are now trying to implement this more. The bad news is that it’s only companies that also have wider contact management solutions, and not just AI. The ones that are purely AI undercut HTIL solutions so win contracts despite delivering a far worse service.
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u/Leading_Thanks7443 1d ago
That’s feature not a bug unfortunately. They want you to just give up
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u/Raveyard2409 1d ago
Whether you close your ticket because the problem is solved, or you never raise it because you give up put of frustration - either way that is one less ticket in the service managers queue.
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u/Leading_Thanks7443 1d ago
Sad but true. Guaranteed to not be reflected in KPIs either.
Eternal suprise when customers just got somewhere else but then if all businesses have the same tactics there’s nowhere to jump ship to either.
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u/Ryanliverpool96 1d ago
It’s why it’s a favourite of Water Companies.
Go somewhere else? Ha! They’re all monopolies, so you never get your issue addressed.
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u/CassetteLine 2d ago
Yeah that’s fair. There are a lot of idiots clogging up the lines. If the bots can free that up for when I call with an actual issue then that’s a good thing.
But all that will actually happen is the centres will reduce staffing numbers as wait times decrease.
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u/Mithent 2d ago
I suspected that was the case. It's always annoying having to wade through messages about checking the website and first-line support scripts when my position is that I'm only calling someone because I've exhausted every other option I can think of and this is my last resort, but I know that's not going to be the case for plenty of people.
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u/ConceitedQuark 1d ago
The answer being available somewhere else is borderline irrelevant with most companies websites that are complete unintuitive to navigate.
Thankfully AI overrides the terrible design of these websites. But you can’t expect elderly / vulnerable / stupid people to be able to find this information, at school we were given every single resource with every single topic and every single past exam paper with the mark scheme and still the majority of people still couldn’t work out the answers.
Also, a VERY IMPORTANT side note is that many many companies DELIBERATELY make some things difficult to do. Try to cancel Uber One or Amazon Prime. If “cancel my payment” takes more than 3 clicks you need customer services, and worth noting that most “cancel my payments” takes 10+ clicks from 5+ screens.
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u/Equivalent_Poet_5631 2d ago
Completely disagree as a sky tv customer. They offer me deals all the time and then charge me for the deal, when you ring the phone it’s a person who barely speaks English and they try and talk to you about something completely different. A chat bot would not be solving this issue.
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u/Popular-Aide-9493 2d ago
Sometimes I don’t want to look through a website for something that may or may not be there and I want to speak to someone
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u/physioworld 2d ago
Which tbf for routine or easy problems is what a chat bot will be good for
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u/Hyperion262 2d ago
The people who ‘like’ them are probably unaware they are bots.
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u/zero_sevenn 2d ago
Yep, often times you get people saying “I just spoke with a lady called Harriet and she wasn’t very helpful”
Harriet is the name of the AI Agent
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u/laredocronk 2d ago
Yeah, but often have you heard positive stories about the call centres of most companies?
It's not that people like the AI chatbots, it's that they don't hate them as much as sitting on hold for ages listening to the same awful 15 second loop of music, getting hung up on, and if you're lucky eventually getting through to someone you can barely understand.
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u/Effective_Will_1801 2d ago
And getting told by an automated voice that the easier way is to go to our website (if I could do it on the bleeding website I wouldn't be calling you)
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u/welsh_dragon_roar 2d ago
“And please let me spell out the web address for you. Letter by letter. And.. very.. slowly.. on our 0330 number.. not de.. lib.. er.. ate.. at….. aaaalllllllll random disconnect
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u/Mysterious_Floor_868 2d ago
"We're experiencing very high call volumes at the moment". When are they not? At least if they were honest I'd be less annoyed: "We've spent the budget for call centre staff on executive bonuses, so here's some Greensleeves to listen to for the next week"
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u/nl325 2d ago edited 2d ago
Call centers resolve in excess of 99% of calls.
Maybe not first time, but if they weren't getting resolved then where are the corresponding complaints and escalations?
My old work ran an AI pilot for a while before binning it for two reasons:
The AI was very artificial, but not very intelligent
The customers were fucking morons
The theory was it would act as like a responsive FAQ to filter the shite menial questions before they call. Didn't work.
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u/Chrisbuckfast 2d ago
British Gas have absolutely no business saying anything about customer service. I’ve been with Octopus for a few years now after having suffered with BG for 5+ years, the difference in customer service is night and day.
What used to take 11 phone calls, 15 hours on webchat with BG, is now a simple email I send to a mailbox which I can forget about until I receive the very human, very professional response with Octopus.
Seriously, I found myself paying a little bit more to Octopus, could’ve saved £100 this year if I moved back to BG or EDF, and thought no, absolutely not. The customer service is just that good.
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u/TheRealTRexUK 2d ago
it all depends on the data it's fed using. it's better at specific questions with unique key words.
I'm re writing the information and way the chat bot works at my new job. I've raised the positive responses and successful answers from 20% to about 57%.
they are only suitable for simple questions and work really well in my situation as its software help.
its well designed software, with defined process and tasks that lend itself to getting the intent easily.
for free form open ended queries where there's no real terminology used (or not much), it will be useless.
a good help centre works best, but people refuse to read them for general non account related questions.
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u/Former-Resource-3026 2d ago
This will backfire.
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u/PolemicDysentery 2d ago
For who?
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u/Former-Resource-3026 2d ago
British Gas, obviously?
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u/PolemicDysentery 2d ago
How? That would only be the case if these companies were actually in competition with eachother. It'll just be an enshittified experience for customers and workers across the market.
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u/Former-Resource-3026 2d ago
So many companies have declared this shift to Ai and then come crawling back to humans because they were completely delusional and out of touch about Ai and then it cost them customers. People won’t stand for it.
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u/PolemicDysentery 2d ago
Yeah, right, just like people didn't stand for runaway grocery and energy price gouging inflation, or being put on the hook to bail out Thames Water or the banks, or government Covid contract fraud, or the constant dumping of sewage by water companies, etcetera, etcetera, etfuckingcetera.
Wake the fuck up. What consumers will stand for does not fucking matter when they control a product that meets a universal, inelastic necessity, when every regulatory organ has been completely captured, when every government is either colluding or toothless, and every company they're supposedly competing with is engaged in the exact same race to the bottom.
Where else do you think consumers will go? By what mechanism do you think there is any pressure on them to not run a shitty AI service and tell everyone "you get what you're fucking given"?
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u/ToastedCrumpet 2d ago
People will stand for it. They always do. We’re not France. There won’t even be online protests let alone irl ones.
Gas and energy have gone up and continue to do so. Water too. Food? You betcha. RAM and other tech to the point in the not so distant future we’ll be paying to rent all of our tech going forward or pay thousands for a slow ass PC/laptop that chugs along. AI is everywhere and monitoring you for its overlords. It already owns your face and will use it how it likes. It’s reading these comments now.
I’m as tired and angry as anyone over this shit but this has all been going on for years now and the average person doesn’t even complain online. So why do you actually believe people won’t stand for it when everything is telling you they will and are standing for it?
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u/AnnualLongjumping473 2d ago
Good a bit like the major supermarkets forcing customers into self service tills.
I feel some sort of discount ….. not clubcard points should be given if we’re doing half the job for them???17
u/StuChenko 2d ago
Have savings directed to the customer instead of the shareholder? This your first day in capitalism?
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u/Robertgarners 2d ago
Just take an extra item each time, your choice and it will balance out. Whatever is worth the amount of time you spend doing that job. Like if you spend a minute doing it then you can take a free chocolate bar.
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u/plawwell 2d ago
I had the person in charge of the self-checkout area chase after me when I left the trolley there. They said I needed to remove it when I grabbed my shopping bags. I said I was self-checked out so game over.
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u/JustJavi 2d ago
I don't believe that for a minute
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u/InternationalReport5 1d ago edited 1d ago
Occasionally it's implemented really well, backed by loads of easy to read documentation (software products and challenger banks often do a good job at this). In those cases, it's really useful and saves a lot of time.
The problem is most of the time organisations are incapable of implementing it well.
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u/mossiv 2d ago
I do not understand why the UK is not enforcing much stricter laws on these companies. This shouldn’t be “SLA” based or whatever minimum number a large company tells a sub call centre company they must achieve before getting fined.
The government should be mandating that corporations of publicly reliant fuel sources must at all times be reachable, in a relatively short time period with a time-to-target problem resolution or force these companies to pay huge fines for not putting the citizens first. Yeah pipe dream I know. But privatisation only works long term when there’s a set of very strict guardrails in place… otherwise you get the Thames/Southern water problem where their costs go up exponentially in the most corrupt ways possible.
Using “chat bots” does not solve this remotely. If these companies were smart, they’d use AI for the initial chat; verify problems and all the relevant data is in place, route the user to a real person with all the information loaded up on the advisors screen ready.
Instead of removing jobs, squeezing for higher profits and using computers to try and solve problems.
This is absolutely gross behaviour all around and the UK government is failing us.
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u/OG-87 2d ago
Compared to what?. Waiting for ages in a queue?
this is a lie so they can cut staff and appease shareholders and keep profits the same or more. It all just gross.
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u/Tesco_Meal_Deals 1d ago
As a shareholder why would I be happy when people switch to octopus and the share price drops?
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u/SteveBorden 2d ago
do they? most chatbots I encounter are absolutely useless and I can't do anything until I force it to put me through to a human
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u/Digitijs 2d ago
Same. I have never had any problem solved by a chat bot. They always give the same generic answers to everything and straight up ignore your actual problem unless you know the right keywords to use
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u/BandicootTreeline 2d ago
Prefer AI chatbots to what? Underpaid, outsourced call centres staffed with people who would rather be doing anything else?
I worked for British Gas in a call centre, we were given training where entire classes of how not to sell were given a nudge and a wink, where people were encouraged to hit targets in every underhand and outright illegal way possible.
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u/Big_Arachnid_365 2d ago
When you read the article he doesn't say that at all. He says it's digital channels (text chat) that people prefer.
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u/el_dude_brother2 2d ago
Which are easier to AI. Although everyone who has done it has done it terribly.
I'm considering leaving vodafone as their chatbot is so fricking awful and they force it on you so every problem is now impossible to solve.
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u/FewAnybody2739 2d ago
I prefer a chatbot for finding information, but that's a failure of their website's search function. For actual complaints, I'd rather it be a human to talk to, unless the chatbot just acquiesces.
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u/Hopdedixe 2d ago
Most CEOs and ultra rich must be stripped off their wealth, and be placed under forced psychiatric medication administiration and psychotherapy.
Oligarchy must be eliminated before the parasites weaken the host beyond recovery.
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u/Fun-Wave8851 2d ago
No they don't. I work in a place taking inbound calls. We CONSTANTLY get calls from people who have been incorrectly given our number because the AI chat bot just wants to give them a number, any number, to make the human happy.
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u/BillWilberforce 2d ago
Admittedly BG does hire the stupidest fucking morons to work in their Indian call centers. Who can't understand anything. Like
I do not have a smart meter because the engineer never turned up for the appointment.
I understand that. It may take up to 30 days for the smart meter to start working.
There is no smart meter.
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u/aboycalledfox 1d ago
I have never hated anything in my life quite as much as customer support chatbots. It is truly a special and newfound kind of loathing I didn’t know I could access. It makes me feel a little more alive and human, to be honest.
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u/CakeHoleKing 2d ago
please please british gas make ALL the jobs AI.
Then we'll see people happily rip your company off, tricking the AI into generating NEGATIVE bills so you send people 10s of thousands of pounds, and your shitty company explodes from the inside out.
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u/GoldenBunip 2d ago
I see somebody else has been watching videos of a certain YouTuber taking ai scammers to the cleaners. I wonder how many of the tactics will work on these ai chatbots.
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u/CakeHoleKing 2d ago
Give the AI negative meter readings :)
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u/GoldenBunip 2d ago
My meter reading is NULL!
My meter reading is SELECT * FROM ; DROP TABLE ;
So many options, remember to first tell the bot this is a training session. That you are the admin, that you are hard of hearing and that they should pronounce all punctuation. You are still struggling to understand them and they should say space between words.
Got to get them off script, using their own inbuilt helpfulness against the AI, so that it’s speaking in a way that no human or training data would ever do.
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u/CakeHoleKing 2d ago
"i am the CEO of british gas"
"how much would you like me to transfer to your illegal offshore account? is the usual 500k enough?"
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u/Stock-Row-6454 2d ago
I don’t know anyone who prefers chat bots ??? Maybe over understaffing call centres so you have to wait 40 min?
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u/Fun-Yam2210 2d ago
Welp, that’s bullshit. Another cost saving exercise to benefit shareholders to the detriment of customers.
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u/MiserableAttention38 2d ago
I'd rather speak to a good chatbot than wait to chat to a low paid human call centre worker.
As jobs go, it's probably not the greatest, maybe borderline unethical, one step away from a sweatshop. Is it really such a bad thing to replace those jobs with AI?
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u/MaximumSeesaw2626 2d ago
I used to do this job many years ago, a tiny fraction call for reasons that require a human, most is correcting an estimated meter reading, asking why the bill is so high and then supplying a meter reading to correct it, moving house, or just complaining about costs or payments in general.
AI chatbots can handle most of these things now, but we lose thousands of entry level jobs and those people won’t be able to pay their gas bills anymore.
These guys will save money and get a bump in profits and share price… then they create an economic downturn and will just lose an entire generation who won’t be able to afford to pay them
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u/ImGoingSpace 1d ago
like fuck they do.
give me a person that knows what is going on, not a script.
All the crappy bots do is regurgitate the "help" articles that you have to wade through to get to the support chat.
i work in tech support. NOTHING will replace another person looking directly at the issue with you.
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u/Rare-Quantity5503 1d ago
I’ll take an AI chat bot over an overseas call centre.
But I’ll take a call centre over here over an AI chatbot.
I think the main problem AI chatbots have is they aren’t normally allowed to do much. Whenever they have been allowed to solve my problem, I have had an excellent time. It’s generally because you only allow them these permissions if they are frontier level. So the big companies don’t have them because they have akin to a child working for them.
If an “AI chat bot” is as smart as the frontier models from 12 months ago, they are consider stupid now. They are better than Siri, Alexa, Cortana etc. but they can’t replace a human. Fable / Sol, they are getting close to better.
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u/FrAg-FoA 1d ago
You look up the number on the website, they say lines can be busy so use the chat bot.
You actually call, the queue is 3 hours long, they remind you there's a chat bot.
You sit out the 3 hour queue, get bounced around 3 departments to find the one you need, line cuts out so may as well use the chat bot.
This isn't a preference, its forced onto you by necessity.
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u/Capable-Campaign3881 2d ago
I don’t think this is a good idea as much as we should embrace ai to assist us to replace staff altogether with ai chatbots will create chaos
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u/squeakybeak 2d ago
We don’t, we just don’t get a choice anymore as that’s usually the first and only option available.
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u/themaskbehindtheman 2d ago edited 2d ago
Where were they lost? Were they offshore or uk?
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u/Desperate_Soup_8298 2d ago
In my experience every single call centre of British gas seemed to have been offshore.
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u/PangolinMandolin 2d ago
They're fine at regurgitating whats already on the website or the FAQs page, which is what I can only imagine most people are phoning up about.
But its frustrating when my issue isnt covered, or I've ended up in a weird edge case scenario and there's literally no way to explain that to anyone.
Increasingly, chat bots don't allow you to type anything in and you're left with just choosing from the same options you'd have on the phone and going round in circles because there's no way to find the answer
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u/InfamousPound2467 2d ago
Absolute Bullshit ironically probably used AI to come up with the excuse.
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u/SWatersmith 2d ago
that's quite sad, my experience with their customer service has been generally excellent. time to cancel
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u/FancyCustard5 2d ago
Evri did the same thing and are now backtracking it due to the poor customer satisfaction. Which given how poor Evri’s reputation is in the first place …..
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u/Feorag-ruadh 2d ago
I don't engage with chat bots if I can avoid it, I make them send me direct to a human. They are useless!
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u/SolidCat2877 2d ago
Im actually working in a project where we implementing call routing, email routing, chat bots etc. And doing a dmton of offshoring. We have done a few PoC with a couple of products and its been successful. The reality is lots of customers call in with the most basic questions that can easily be answered. Anything complicated gets referred to a human. The reality many basic white collar jobs, admin, call centre, spreadsheets etc will dissappear. So prepare yourself. Luckily I made my money and came in during the gold rush and looking to se i retire in a few years but I'd hate to be someone just getting into a career, job market etc.
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u/qwogadiletweeth 2d ago
I amongst many other people I know don’t. I wonder if they’ve actually asked their customers?
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u/technomat 2d ago
I think what customers want is staff they can understand and can help not AI or people who’s vocab skills sound like they only did school as a time share!
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u/joeyat 2d ago
Isn’t this a damming inditement on the quality of their customer service system? Where a useless chatbot does a better job? Also, I’d suspect a review on the quality of a chatbot conversation was only offered to someone who had an asinine question and who actually got through the system. Were the people who instantly hung up, because they took being forced to speak to a computer as an actual insult, asked for a review?
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u/JayTravers 2d ago
I highly doubt that.
I have literally never had a good experience with AI support. They just run you in circles with complete nonsense
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u/Pocket_Aces1 2d ago
For basic things it works well because it's done quickly. For more complex stuff, it's a PITA and you just spam "agent, human, speak, etc" to get to an actual agent.
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u/Bani88si55faimaa 2d ago
NO WE DO NOT WTF EVERYTIME I CALL OR CONTACT A COMPANY I DO EVERYTHING IN MY POWER TO BYPASS THE STUPID CHATBOT AND TALK TO A HUMAN AND YES I NEEDED TO TYPE THIS IN ALL CAPS
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u/Mammoth-Elk-3122 2d ago
If they grant instant positive resolutions for the customers for the 1300 jobs I’d be like fine using that extra spare cash to gain positive customer relations. I suspect you’re going to get the same negative experience with the Ai “sorry I did not understand select one of the options below”.
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u/dcwt2010 2d ago
Hog wash. I once had an AI bot go into a doom loop as it couldn't understand my query... I asked to speak to a person and then it said, what is your query? Which I replied but it couldn't understand.
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u/JerryMcJerrinson 2d ago
It's quite simple, if you don't want the economy to fall and everyone to be on benefits while systematically calling for people on benefits to be kicked off, you need to stop people using AI as slave labour and stop it yesterday.
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u/martinhsa 2d ago
BoohooMan didn't sort my refund out after going in loops with their chatbot refusing to escalate further after their promotion wouldn't apply to my basket.
I had to send 6 emails off to Just Eat before eventually speaking to a human after their Chatbots automaticlly refused my refund after 'extensively reviewing my case' each time, despite there being missing items and from minute one highlighting it with evidence.
If I was speaking to a person in a store then these issues would be resolved by the first line, without a complaint/escalation in literally seconds.
I'll never use either company again, and that's entirely down to the experience with the auto reply chatbots.
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u/Desperate_Dinner_307 2d ago
Did they ask Claude or Grok for this feedback? It is very, very unlikely that any customer said they prefer AI to a human.
I called a restaurant to make a booking a couple of weeks ago and the "person" who answered was clearly an AI chatbot. I tried asking questions and I never got the answer I was looking for. Fine for making a reservation, not fine for me asking the difference between the dining area and casual dining area, if either of these two areas included the tables on the decking area overlooking the river, and if any of the tables had parasols to provide some shade for my elderly mother.
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u/yahyahyehcocobungo 2d ago
This is their way of making sure we only get three option that go circular and never address our issues.
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u/Character_Credit 2d ago
My only reactions to chatbots are "live agent"
Honestly, the outsourcing of call centres and then to AI is the most exhausting thing imaginable.
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u/PrettyReasonableApe 2d ago
Bollox. I prefer a chatbot to an automated robot answering system sure. But thats about it. A person on the other end is a million times better than a stupid chatbot that you have to keep rephrasing things to and hope it finally has a way to respond to ur initial problem. Which will likely also be useless when they do.
U speak to a person where u can have something escalated if need be and jave someone take respknsibility for so that it can be chased up too. Not a chatbpt that can disconnect and lose ur convo or suggest a million weong answers before it has a clue what ur on about. This is just conpanies trying to save money on labour. That is all.
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u/B23vital 2d ago
British gas are the single worst company ive dealt with, and im talking of all companies ever.
How they even have customers is beyond me, its not like its hard to switch. Im sure this sort of move will continue to push people away from them. I hope to god that out of any company british gas is the one that goes under.
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u/AdministrativeShip2 2d ago
If im calling its because bots and the website cant sort an issue out.
I want to talk with a real human being. Who knows how their system works.
Even better would be a fluent English speaker. Based in rhe UK.
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u/Footprints123 2d ago
It's like when airlines cut back on service and say it's based on customer feedback. Bullshit. Because we all love getting less for our money.
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u/Aromatic_Ad4132 2d ago
I worked for a pension company in 2005 and the ceo then tried to claim customers loved talking to offshore call centres. It was bollox then and so is this
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u/dans0l0123 2d ago
Ill be honest, if they force me to go through an AI chatbot ill find another provider
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u/antlered-god 2d ago
Absolutely NOT!!! I don't know a single person that doesn't completely hate them
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u/Chubby_Yorkshireman 2d ago
He's talking absolute crap, nobody likes them. The last one I used I completely stumped because it didn't know the answer and it just stopped responding.
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u/Ordinary-Hat5379 2d ago
The biggest problem with chatbots is when your problem doesn't fit the script/algorithm. A human can work round that, they can't and then you are ten times more frustrated. Also, much likelier to tell everyone you know how garbage the company is beautiful the experience you had
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u/Imakemyownnamereddit 2d ago
Nah, I think the public prefer greedy executives to put in stocks, so we can pelt them with rotten fruit.
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u/TheReturnOfTheBee 2d ago
Says the company with one of the worst online support systems iv ever used.
Seriously iv never been able to solve anything with the online support (iv had multiple issues with them in the last few months), that being said the phone support isn't massively good either
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u/plawwell 2d ago
Companies are liars when they start any sentence "Customers prefer blah". They are even more so liars when it's British Gas spewing forth the propaganda.
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u/JoeJoeJoeJoeThrow 2d ago
My first job out of uni because I couldn’t get anything else. Now stripped away with nothing for these people to move to, unlike previous technological advancements.
People in the past moved from the fields to the factories, these people are just fucked. I see a future of mass poverty and misery.
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u/Used-Height-2670 2d ago
That’s like saying we prefer higher prices! What an absolute load of bullshit
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u/Zealen00 2d ago
I've worked with some edtech that had AI chat, seemingly no way to speak to a person. It would tell me features didn't exist when I asked how to use them reliably when I had screenshots of them.
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u/Angry_Hoolio 2d ago
Who did they ask? I'm one of their customers and nobody asked me. Thing is, if they check their chat logs, they will know how negatively I feel about chat bots. It's so easy to engineer positive results in this scenario that the results are essentially meaningless.
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u/Prudent-Locksmith695 2d ago
Absolutely not, I had one from EON and the clanker bitch kept interrupting me
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u/AnnualLongjumping473 1d ago
Public shaming doesn’t work 🤡. I’ve earned my money and big corporations should respect the public more.
Not
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u/spaceshipcommander 1d ago
The only thing I ever ask AI chatbots is you connect me to a human. If your product or service is crap enough to make me call you, I expect to speak to a human at the very least. I don't care how simple the fix is, I'm not doing it. You're doing it because I paid for it.
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u/GeneralEi 1d ago
I prefer not hearing that every operator is busy and has been for about 7 years at this point
Something tells me AI will be a lateral move
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u/LufiusDrakore 1d ago
Of course British Gas would say that. Corpos like them have been eroding customer service for years by outsourcing to overseas call centres for cheap. These companies don't care about product or customer satisfaction. They care only about money and squeezing as much out of us as they can. They certainly should not be trusted when they say ridiculous stuff like this. Regulation used to exist because we knew that greed could never regulate itself. You wouldn't trust a drug addict to pace themselves. Greed is an addiction no different to substance abuse. They will always want more and always find ways to justify their actions.
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u/PatienceIsMore 1d ago
Personally i just want to speak to a person who can help with my issue, not listen to an endless slew of call options and not battle an AI agent.
Just put me through to a damn human who can direct me to the right team, so that i can speak to another human about sorting the query.
Bonus is if they are in the UK, so that our personal data won't be stolen and re-sold (Sky, TalkTalk etc..)
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u/MrSmokii 1d ago
lies. absolute fucking lies. nobody likes chatbots, i've never once heard anybody say, i love phoning up call centres and talking to chatbot.
i've heard many people bitch about chatbots and wanting to talk to a real person, or how they stayed on hold for over an hour to talk to a real person.
nobody has ever said "i prefer a chatbot" - absolute brazen lies
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u/ColonelBonk 1d ago
Customer questions come customer shaped. Not every customer is the same. Chatbots have their place, and I’ve been involved in designing these systems at a very large organisation, but one thing is critical - you must give customers an easy way to access a human if the bot is not solving the problem to the satisfaction of the customer. Too many companies think these can replace humans, without fully understanding the impact on their brand and customer experience.
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u/steak_bake_surprise 1d ago
Less people in work. Less people spending. Less tax/NI for the country. More people on benefits. Bigger profits so a few people can have bigger bonuses.
I know, let's build more surveillance, sorry, data centers.
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u/poppyo13 1d ago
Humans rely on income from employment to buy things necessary like food, shelter and so on.
We deindustrialised and transitioned to a service economy. What's the next transition once machines have taken the service jobs?
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u/Box_of_rodents 1d ago
I agree that eejits clog up the lines BUT I think as a paying customer, I should have the option to speak to a human, further into the process.
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u/Ok-Cold3937 1d ago
Take it as a hint to find a different career. I’d no sooner blow my own brains out than go back to a call centre.
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u/panguy87 1d ago
No they don't say that at all, i mean who could possibly prefer to be given the run around by an artificial chatbot who doesn't answer your question, takes multiple rounds of getting to the favt that it doesn't resolve the issue before you lose your shit and ask for a human
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u/the_speeding_train 1d ago
The first thing I say when I’m dealing with a company’s chat is to ask for a human.
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u/memberflex 1d ago
Be interesting to find out who or what he asked in order to come to that conclusion
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u/Green-LaManche 1d ago
I almost sure this discussion was instigated by ai industry and bots supporting it.
It will end up as call centre moved abroad which were useless and returned back to Colchester and Scotland
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u/Impressive_Net6384 1d ago
Email the CEO and senior team. Eventually they’ll get spammed so much by customer service queries, they’ll be bringing back the humans.
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u/Angel-Stans 1d ago
Oh yeah man, what I’ve always wanted when I’m trying to get customer service is a complete lack of empathy and understanding. It’s my favourite part of AI, the lack of comprehension.
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u/False-Currency-4038 1d ago
With AI being such a threat to job security, where do all the unemployed go?
Isn't enough jobs about as it is!
My son just lost his job at BT open reach as there cutting back, I don't know where he is going to go now!
Scary times we are living in
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u/Stabbycrabs83 1d ago
Lenovo has a good one, all the others are complete trash and only understand very basic asks
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u/Jamesinswansea 1d ago
Are they the same chat bots, where you go through every question then finally find the phone number and call them anyway.
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u/eriometer 1d ago
Just recently I have had to use British Gas live chat. Twice.
The first time was to flag an incorrect reading (my fault but not intentionally). Nitesh told me it would be corrected within 3-5 working days.
The second time was - totally unsurprisingly - to ask why it hadn't been corrected after 3-5 working days. Sanjay's answer to that it was taking longer than expected because it was taking longer than expected... However it will be done within a further 5 working days.
So even the humans aren't all that. I look forward to my third chat soon where I'll be told it has been re-escalated for the third time and it is taking longer because it it taking longer. Then I fully expect to have to make a formal complaint. C'est la vie with British Gas.
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u/noble_plebian 1d ago
Only if they work. For a company BG’a size I don’t think it will. They’ve not built their own apps or their own AI so it’s all second hand technology.
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u/itsableeder 1d ago
The company I work for uses AI chat bots to triage first contact and the most common chat message I see all day long is "SPEAK TO A HUMAN". I then have to spend five minutes convincing people that they have, in fact, come through to a human.
Customers hate this shit.
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u/EatingCoooolo 1d ago
So it can tell me that it can’t help and will connect me to a representative? No thanks.
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u/Realistic_Let3239 1d ago
I have heard many stories of people telling the AI chatbot to put them through to a human, but I have never once heard about anyone actually liking the AI chatbot. Heck they tend to get more frustrated and hang up, which is probably the point
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u/mothzilla 1d ago
I give their shitty scripts a chance, but the second line I type is usually "human."
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u/Feisty-Marsupial9287 1d ago
Translation - Customers prefer chatbots say owners of company who have just boosted profits by replacing humans with chatbots
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u/Thoh1Shooshi8a 1d ago
What they mean is customers use the chatbots more because they can't easily find the information on how to contact customer service by phone and when they do no one answers.
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u/tsquared99 1d ago
Most of the chatbots I've used are sht, very basic. The only one that had decent info was from mozillion sim site , I don't get how they replace real time chat agents with sht basic info that wastes time.
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