Yet another Hacker News

Call Center Jobs Are Declining, but 14,000 Calls Show Humans Still Outperform AI

35 points thomas_unise 1 hour ago 47 comments

toomuchtodo 1 hour ago | parent

https://legiscan.com/CA/text/AB1609/id/3460800

- California’s AB 1609 requires large businesses to connect customers with human agents within 15 minutes.

- Businesses exceeding $500 million in revenue must display wait times and disclose chatbot interactions.

- Violations carry civil penalties starting at $5,000, making human access a legal obligation.

redox99 1 hour ago | parent

Having to waste 15 minutes with an AI is still crazy though.

gjsman-1000 1 hour ago | parent

Nah, if it becomes law, we’ll get apps which just call a number for you and run out the clock.

toomuchtodo 1 hour ago | parent

I believe Google and Apple phones support this today. “Hold assist” and “Hold for Me.”

https://support.apple.com/en-us/127521

https://support.google.com/pixelphone/answer/10071878?hl=en

odo1242 1 hour ago | parent

Hold Assist doesn’t work if there’s any speech (like an AI agent) on the line, it specifically only works when on hold.

toomuchtodo 1 hour ago | parent

Easily updated existing feature, code path, and user experience is the point. Just has to be good enough to iterate on.

jcastro 1 hour ago | parent

> must display wait times

"We're sorry, we're receiving more calls than usual, stand by..."

24/7 for over 30 years!

toomuchtodo 1 hour ago | parent

Configure agents for consumers at scale to report violations to regulators. Wait time not accurate or communicated? Complaint filed. Human agent not available within time limit? Complaint filed.

Think about all the time and effort for all of the consumers in the aggregate that would be needed to hold corporate counter parties accountable, with the cost being code and some compute time on device. This is where AI agents shine. They can do the mundane work of capturing evidence of compliance violations, packing the violation event, and reporting them.

Every consumer’s phone becomes a regulator watchdog node. We can even use LLMs to rapidly ship the app(s) needed to do this.

seattle_spring 49 minutes ago | parent

The provider for Chase credit card claims (insurance, price match, etc.) went through a company, EClaimsLine, that had nearly that exact phrase bold and red on their website for many, many years. I'm honestly shocked that their new website after the rebrand to Chase Card Services doesn't say it too.

dmitrygr 52 minutes ago | parent

> AB1609

Status: (Engrossed - Dead) 2016-11-30

toomuchtodo 4 minutes ago | parent

> Status: (Passed) 2026-09-28 - Chaptered by Secretary of State - Chapter 733, Statutes of 2026. [AB1609 Detail]

Link fixed! Additional citations:

https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billStatusClient.xh...

https://www.gov.ca.gov/2026/09/28/governor-newsom-signs-comm...

dataflow 41 minutes ago | parent

I wonder how many companies are going to trivially get around this by connecting you to an operator that makes you wait to be connected to the other department because they can't handle anything and only route calls.

add-sub-mul-div 1 hour ago | parent

The AI era isn't about what performs best. It's about what can be delivered most cheaply and isn't a liability because your competition will be doing the same thing.

symfoniq 1 hour ago | parent

AI “customer service” is so incredibly bad. I’ve not had a single interaction that an AI agent could solve. It’s just a huge waste of my time and an increase in aggravation.

LPisGood 1 hour ago | parent

My assumption is that it is there to make the process less convenient so people only use it if they really need to.

10xDev 1 hour ago | parent

If it is an LLM, it has been prompted to say almost nothing except prewritten responses to avoid legal issues or to avoid free LLM usage. I think it was Chipotle support that would write code if you asked it.

onlyrealcuzzo 1 hour ago | parent

AT&T & Comcast figured out how to have incredibly bad automated service quite a while before LLMs.

augment_me 1 hour ago | parent

It's a really good way to offload costs to the customer. You make the process so full of friction that the customer feels like it's not worth the process to make the return. Works the best with big monopolies

seattle_spring 52 minutes ago | parent

I'm 100% convinced that this is the reason so many customer service jobs are being shelved.

No one who actually wants to provide a good experience for their customers would offshore, nor would they offload this to AI agents. They know that customers have very limited opportunities nowadays, so the company responses seem to be along the lines of, "fine, go somewhere else! Oh, there's nowhere else to go? I guess you'll be staying with us afterall muahaha!"

s22a 11 minutes ago | parent

Correct.

People here lack a lot of nuance.

You think the average consumer is willing to fight firms hard to get stuff fixed? Absolutely not. Things like switching costs is what firms take advantage of -> they know you most likely arent going anywhere so shut up and accept the poor service.

Would people here generally fight and switch? Sure. But you lot are what % of the population..?

f311a 48 minutes ago | parent

Some customers are smart too, they just use their own agents to flood support agents until the problem is resolved.

missedthecue 52 minutes ago | parent

A lot of the HN crowd is a lot more technically capable than the average consumer. The more competent customers never see the 80-90% of inbound ticket volume that are items answered in FAQs that can be solved with an AI agent. They only know they had an edge case problem they couldn't resolve after quite a bit of effort. And the AI agent and canned responses were totally useless and frustrating barriers to the real help you needed (a person).

After putting in AI agents this year, our customer service scores went up considerably. And the reason was basically that the average customer was getting way faster answers to queries.

dataflow 47 minutes ago | parent

How does the average customer even get a hold of a human in the first place? The bots are so aggressively unwilling to connect you that I sometimes fail.

missedthecue 37 minutes ago | parent

We only have chat/email based support, no experience in phone trees. If the agent determines the question is outside of defined scope, it puts it into the human queue. We are seeing very low rates of improper filtering (i.e., people never making it to the human queue).

This is not a plug and play customer bot product, we actually built a custom solution on top of Bedrock.

tintor 43 minutes ago | parent

Average scores going up, but what about tail? 90th / 95th / 99th percentile

missedthecue 41 minutes ago | parent

For us, they are still at the same scores as before AI agents.

lkbm 46 minutes ago | parent

I've gotten automatic refunds from Amazon bots. (I also got automatic credit from Lyft, but I consider that a failure because I wanted my money back.)

10xDev 1 hour ago | parent

"AI"

Usually when I chat with a support bot it doesn't feel like an LLM but something that performs keyword matching and a prewritten response pre-LLM era.

gdulli 1 hour ago | parent

I hate it either way, because my typical issue is something bespoke that needs a human to resolve. Or else I wouldn't be reaching out.

dmd 59 minutes ago | parent

HN readers - and even more so HN commentators - are not typical though. Literally 99% of people interacting really are asking a question answered by the FAQ, just like 99% of people calling the customer service number for their credit card want to pay their bill or find out their balance.

dmitrygr 53 minutes ago | parent

So then offer the shibboleet option! https://xkcd.com/806/

arjie 48 minutes ago | parent

Doesn’t work anymore. Our apartment building has a few providers and people were trying to report an outage with ASNs specified and suggesting they check BGP advertisements and so on. It turns out our Google Fiber microwave dishes were misaligned.

But all shibboleths are obsolete now.

mym1990 1 hour ago | parent

I don't know how much more cost effective AI bots are for customer service over offshore call centers currently, but I would guess that the industry sees the AI tooling getting much better over the next X years, while call center agents are going to be relatively level in terms of skill, so companies are investing early on in the technology. To be honest, my favorite customer service experience are ones where I tell a bot the issue, and they just refund me my cost, widely seen on delivery apps and Amazon. This is ripe for moral hazard but I'm sure there is monitoring happening for that as well.

alephnerd 52 minutes ago | parent

> I don't know how much more cost effective AI bots are for customer service over offshore call centers currently

They are already fairly cost effective. A the Corporate VC arms of the major call center and BPO players like Infosys, TCS, and others have already funded a large portion of TTS startups, and in a lot of cases are training on customer calls.

There's a reason ElevenLabs, Deepgram, and others are the giants they are now.

plasticeagle 37 minutes ago | parent

"so companies are investing early on in the technology."

But this doesn't make sense. The AI bots are worse at the job, across all metrics, other than being cheaper. They're not "investing in the technology" in the sense of actual investment. They are just trying to save money. That's it.

If they cared about the experience of their customers, they wouldn't touch these things with a barge pole.

sdthjbvuiiijbb 1 hour ago | parent

This is published by Bold Agents, a company that appears to provide a platform for AI customer service agents, and is based on their own data. Doesn't this really just mean that they're saying that their own product kind of sucks?

I believe Sierra is the market leader in this space with a few other companies like Salesforce and Decagon also competing. It would be more interesting to see an evaluation of performance by these parties before making sweeping claims about the performance of AI agents as a whole.

TrainedMonkey 57 minutes ago | parent

Some, maybe most, humans outperform AI. I've had some calls where I would have preferred an AI that could not understand me to an agent whom I could not understand AND who could barely understand me.

ge96 57 minutes ago | parent

Man that annoys me calling some place and it's that openai voice answering

silverFork 54 minutes ago | parent

don't worry, they will make Ai listen to the calls with human agents and in about a year, it will out perform them. Have you heard that "this call will be recorded" blah blah.. Now they will use those recordings... Time is on their side.

dmitrygr 54 minutes ago | parent

Support has costs. Fine. I consider purchases under $500 to not include support, and treat them all as "sold as is"

However, if I need support and cannot reach a real living breathing human in under 30 min regarding any purchase over $500, I hang up, call AmEx and file a chargeback, citing inability to gain support. So far they have backed me every time. If enough people do it, chargeback costs send the message.

bluedino 42 minutes ago | parent

I've used some great AI support agents/bots, whatever they're called. An example of a great one is Lemonade (the insurance company).

Most of the others are terrible. I'll pick on Dell for this next one. Their website in general, is terrible. Why would their support agent be any better?

We purchased a switch from Dell, that cost more than my SUV. Having a hardware issue with it, can't remember if it was fans or a power supply or what. It needs someone to come out and repair it, and we have the big fancy service plan.

There's no way to find the switch on the Dell support website. It's not listed anywhere.

https://www.dell.com/support/home/en-us/products/networking_...

You can't actually contact support, you have to identify your device, and then you get options from there.

https://www.dell.com/support/incidents-online/en-us/contactu...

However, this product doesn't have a service tag, or express service code, so you can't do that.

So you try to use the 'Virtual Assistant', who has no idea what you're trying to tell it, no matter which way you try. They link to a contact page but you just end up getting looped back around. There is no useful information to be extracted from this dumb thing.

I finally found a phone number on the website, and was connected to a woman who sounded like she was smoking cigarettes in a basement somewhere in Alabama. She looked through her notes on the computer, and found out for this particular switch I need to go through the OEM manufacturer. I was relieved to have gotten useful information.

iJohnDoe 6 minutes ago | parent

Wow! That is crazy expensive switch.

Also, a relief we dropped Dell for these exact reasons a few years ago. Seems nothing has changed and it’s good we got away from them.

plasticeagle 39 minutes ago | parent

AI slop article, of course.

It can be summed up thus : AI agents answer the phone slightly more often, but they get hung up on 7 times more often than humans. Overall they make customer service and your business work much worse.

It is also a bullshit advertorial for a product; In this case, an AI sales agent. There is (almost) no worse idea in human history than an AI agent trying to sell things to people. Their entire website is AI generated, and is so stuffed full of slop that it's impossible to read.

Forgeties79 38 minutes ago | parent

The problem is it doesn’t matter if they perform better. If AI is just above “too shitty” and costs less, that’s what businesses will generally choose. And that’s the entire problem. “Good enough” reigns supreme for most businesses. In some cases that’s fine, in a lot of others it just tests our patience/tolerance and makes things painful.

gradus_ad 35 minutes ago | parent

1-800 Contacts has my undying love because their customer support is excellent and seamless. I wouldn't say I look forward to calling them, but it's just so simple and effortless.

redrix 28 minutes ago | parent

Some of the best uses of AI in call centres that I’ve seen focus on improving human interaction instead of getting rid of it. For example:

- Finding information in the background / performing an account health check instead of putting the caller on hold for 20 minutes.

- Helping newer consultants find the same offers experienced staff know about amongst 200 pages of active/targeted offers.

- Automatically documenting calls so when someone calls back, they don’t get a “sorry, I can’t find any notes about that on your account”.

- Giving the offshore call center consultant a customized script based on the active discussion instead of a generic one

(Yes, reading from a script is still bad, but at least this makes it somewhat more natural rather than it feeling like you’re talking to a lobotomised employee.)

AaronAPU 3 minutes ago | parent

Had a recall reimbursement through Stellantis and couldn’t figure out if it was the best AI I’ve ever spoken to or the most professional human I’ve ever spoken to.