Yes but no. Do you know how many people call support in legacy industries, ignore the voice prompt, and demand to speak to a person to pay their recurring, same-cost-every-month bill? It is honestly shocking.

There are legitimate support cases that could be made better with AI but just getting to them is honestly harder than I thought when I was first exposed. It will be a while.

There needs to be some element of magic and push back. Every turn has to show that the AI is getting closer to resolving your issue and has synthesized the information you've given it in some way.

We've found that just a "Hey, how can I help?" will get many of these customers to dump every problem they've ever had on you, and if you can make turn two actually productive, then the odds of someone dropping out of the interaction is low.

The difference between "I need to cancel my subscription!" leading to "I can help with that! To find your subscription, what's your phone number?" or "The XYZ subscription you started last year?" is huge.

Demanding a person on the phone use the website on your behalf is a great life hack, I do it all the time. Often they try to turn me away saying "you know you can do this on our website", I just explain that I found it confusing and would like help. If you're polite and pleasant, people will bend over backwards to help you out over the phone.

With "legacy industries" in particular, their websites are usually so busted with short session timeouts/etc that it's worth spending a few minutes on hold to get somebody else to do it.

Sorry, I disagree here. For the specific flow I'm talking about - monthly recurring payments - the UX is about as highly optimized for success as it gets. There are ways to do it via the web, on the phone with a bot, bill pay in your own bank, set it up in-store, in an app, etc.

These people don't want the thing done, they want to talk to someone on the phone. The monthly payment is an excuse to do so. I know, we did the customer research on it.

Recurring monthly payments I set to go automatic, but setting that up in the first place I usually do through a phone call. I know some people just want somebody to talk to, same as going through the normal checkout lines at the grocery store, but I think an equally large part of this is people just wanting somebody else to do the work (using the website, or scanning groceries) for them.

> but I think an equally large part of this is people just wanting somebody else to do the work (using the website, or scanning groceries) for them.

Again, this is something my firm studied. Not UX "interviews," actual behavioral studies with observation, different interventions, etc. When you're operating at utility scale there are a non-negligible number of customers who will do more work to talk to a human than to accomplish the task. It isn't about work, ease of use, or anything else - they legitimately just want to talk.

There are also some customers who will do whatever they can to avoid talking to a human, but that's a different problem than we're talking about.

But this is a digression from my main point. Most of the "easy things" AI can do for customer support are things that are already easily solved in other places, people (like you) are choosing not to use those solutions, and adding AI doesn't reduce the number of calls that make it to your customer service team, even when it is an objectively better experience that "does the work."