apple
Apple Working on ChatGPT-Style AI Assistant for Customer Support
Discussion
âIâm sorry, I canât help you with that. Please try again later.â
That is clearly siri not chat gpt
"You raise an excellent point, restarting your router will not be helpful because your iPhone is using 5G!"
I have a feeling that sentence was from past experienceâŚ
This morning Apple Music was playing a good song and I said âHey Siri, add this song to my Apple Music libraryâ and she responded by saying âI donât see an app for thatâŚâ and I just think Apple has other things to focus on. I donât think they should be multitasking this one.
I see everyone doing this. Verizon has done this when I had to call Tech support a could days ago. Instead of menus, now you just talk to their stupid AI Agent.
When I worked in a call center for a major healthcare company when I was younger, it was no secret and they even told us, it's their goal that live agents are a customers last resort for support. They pushed online and automated measures first so hard, it was almost impossible to get through to us.
And you wonder why live agents are so bad? Because literally everyday they held mass interviewing and hiring fairs because like 70% of people wouldn't make it through the first training stages. Just kids off the streets. They had people hired and ready for training before stage 1 was even done from the previous hires because they knew they would be left with only a handful of people and they needed to have the next wave ready to go. It was an endless cycle. So yeah, most CS agents have slim to no real knowledge. They literally are just reading off the screen and we were trained to NEVER go off script or handle problems our own ways even if they were better. We have horrid workflows we had to stick to or else we would be written up or fired.
Something NOBODY wants.
Ew. I hate ALL bot customer support.
Fuck no!!!!
I mean, I have been asking for this for years! /s
What was Apple Intelligence all about then?
Handing over customer support to AI damages the customer service. Imagine trying to get real help and being stuck with the AI assistant. They should never cut down real human support.
They are really fumbling it with AI.
No one likes chatbots for Customer support. No one.
Is it actually just going to use ChatGPT like the company I work for?
âHmm. I donât know thatâ
My previous company uses ChatGPT as the front of house and most of the chats ended up with a live agent supper frustrated and angry.
And this is why they have laid off tons of support advisors lately.
Really sucks.
âLet me search the web forâŚâ
Disappointing. Iâd rather speak to a human, a lot more often than not. This is the way customer service is going, and I understand that, but itâs still disappointing, especially for a company like Apple
"Here's what I found on the web..."
Summary Through Apple Intelligence: Apple is developing an AI-based âSupport Assistantâ for the Apple Support app, allowing users to interact with a chatbot for support before contacting live agents. The feature, utilizing generative AI, will provide solutions to customer inquiries and may allow for content uploads.
Quite possibly a perfect fit for Apples Support culture as I have never ever had a support call where anyone has acknowledged that something either isn't working the way it should or what I want to do literally isn't possible.
so some sort of large language model that can never say no and will never acknowledge that something is actually broken on their end would be a pretty seamless transition
The most hilarious part is the fact that despite having terms in its database, I guarantee you that if I were to ask it about literally anything related to problems in having with moviesanywhere, a partner service apple has been a part of for years, the bot would crash or refuse to work just like an Apple employee is forced to.
I'd never heard of movies anywhere, but looking at their site they seem to be a separate company from Apple entirely. Just because their service can interact with Apple systems like iTunes doesn't mean Apple employees would have any idea about how to help you if something wasn't working properly.
As long as they can expedite my app reviews
Every company has a chatbot and they are all entirely useless except for the users with basic issues that can be solved with a cursory kbase search like âhow do I reset my password.â Anything even remotely more difficult will require a human. I hope Appleâs raises that limbo bar.
In a lot of cases, that's like 95% of CS cases
I grant that. But it pisses me off that there isnât a faster way to escalate my issue to a Senior Advisor when I know out the gate Tier 1 isnât going to help me. đ¤
You and the hundreds of Karens that think they should get special treatment. That's not to say your case isn't worthwhile, but these systems are put into place because more often than not people will abuse literally everything.
âWhy canât I see the head of the cardiovascular department when I go to the hospital for chest pains >:-(â
Thatâs what you sound like btw
I completely understand the why â I just wish there was a shortcut for those of us who use and teach this stuff for a living and know when the issue is outside the scope of T1 support
Everybody thinks they âknowâ this stuff though. Then the shortcut is just what everybody will take regardless if it fits the situation or not. Iâm Tier 3 support in my role and only support actual employees having issues with the tools and never a general customer. People who are told policy on how to do what for every situation, and they still cheat the system to skip tiers of support they deem ânot necessaryâ and still cram up our support queue for things that arenât in our scope. Multiple times a day. Daily.
You give the average Joe a backdoor, and thatâs all theyâre ever going to use
Absolutely. Again, I understand why there isn't one.
đ
Just like they raised the AI bar with Apple intelligence?
Well, that depends. I work in the space and it is often about efficiency gains. Consider every minute of customer service produces about 1⏠of cost, sometimes more sometimes less, depending on location. So automation has an insane impact here.
While you cant fully automate many support processes, most do have aspects to them that can be automated. Consider for example asking the customer for his Customer-ID, his adress or his birthdate for identification purposes. After that you simply give over to customer service and you have saved a minute or two. And if you can fully automate a password reset, which might make up about 5% of all support requests, then that is an insane ROI for automation.
It is very much possible now thanks to Agentic AI (if done properly!). AI can now more effectively perform tasks and communicate with other AI agents thanks to MCP and A2A
Ok Dario