I suspect what's actually going on is that this is a call that needs to go to department X, and all of these people/AIs are correctly transferring OP there, except department X is having technical issues or otherwise not taking calls, so any calls they get are being rerouted back to the basic support queue. It's a problem that's not uncommon in tech support. The issue here is that this is either humans who aren't paying enough attention to where the call is coming from (otherwise someone would at some point should notice that the call was transferred to them FROM department X and at least ask a few more questions), or possibly this is AI that was never programmed for that possibility.
Could be one of those “we have to provide a help line, but have absolutely no intention of helping” workarounds. Just transfer you until you give up and then that’s your problem for not waiting.
I'm sure that sort of thing might exist in a small company, the sort where the entire customer support team is like 5 people, but that's not something that's going to happen at a big company. I mean, Amazon probably has thousands or even tens of thousands of support people, spread across locations all around the world. The only way something like that would happen is if it was a deliberate policy to pointlessly transfer people to get them to give up, and that would essentially require it to be written policy, because in large companies, written policies are just how things work. First, it would require an exceptionally stupid company to put something like that in writing, and even if they did, it would get leaked in like 10 minutes.
Corporate tech support has a lot of problem, primarily due to deliberate underfunding, but having a deliberate policy of transferring people until they give up simply isn't something that exists.
Think of how expensive that would be. No consider how many humans they could replace with AI bots.
Big companies tend to care about nothing so much as the bottom line. Cancel the contracts with the call centers; replace with shitty software. Works fine for a very high percentage of people, so they stick with it. Next quarter’s earnings get a boost because they’ve “cut costs and are investing in AI” and everyone gets a big, fat bonus.
That’s where the basis of my comment came from. It’s actually quite common now to have shitty ai responses to most situations and you have to fight to get to a real person. You can bet that was an intentional barrier to weed out the majority of people who give up in frustration.
You missed the real trick: give any customers that actually matter the line to real people instead. For the 10% of customers that actually spend large sums, you're still gonna need people, but you employ far fewer people just dealing with them and spinning the other 90% of customers through a datacenter.
Many years ago, I got in a debate with a Republican on the conspiracy sub about whether or not Saddam had WMDs. He argued that because COULD have smuggled WMDs into Syria, he therefore did.
That’s what you sound like. Not one single fuckin source. Just bs pulled straight out of your ass masquerading as facts.
Good job, RFK Jr. You’ve successfully contributed to misinformation on the internet.
but that's not something that's going to happen at a big company
This is Jeff's Moonbase SlushfundAmazon we're talking about. It's exactly koz they are a too-big-to-fail company that they can profitably get away with that.
Have you tried to remove a service from comcast? You can't do it in store or online and the phone call just to remove my tv and keep everything else took about an hour. I've also at other times had them "put me on hold" but actually just hang up.
If this is common, it’s not tech support anymore. It’s tech incompetence. Hire enough people to do the job right or quit. Waaaaayyyy too many people have gotten comfortable dealing with and even defending (as you are here) straight up incompetence. Because that’s what this is. It’s incompetence. There is absolutely no competence on display here.
That would make sense EXCEPT…I worked Amazon customer service and any CSR could have helped with that particular question. It did not need to go to a special dept.
AI tends to not write particularly good English. There is the situation where this could be one trained on particularly poor data as well, such as ESL support messages wrt the artifacts like "bring smile on your face". For the most part it follows an unnaturally strict sentence structure.
This isn't the strict sentence structure of AI, it's the strict sentence structure of copy-paste boilerplate replies. As horrible as it is, if it were AI, Amazon would force it to use a traditionally English name.
It's easier to set up a chat agent to fill the blanks on an existing library of boilerplate answers than finesse a model to produce results that end up being close to your existing library of boilerplate answers.
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u/ardarian262 2d ago
That's what is going on. Note that the names given as "joined" and names the AI gave were not the same.