AI agents in customer support
I really love how easy some customer support issues are solved using AI services, but now I'm experiencing the nightmare side of it because things aren't fitting in a certain box, and the bots don't know how to handle it. Yet there is a lack of human support so I keep going in circles constantly for a week straight now and it's so frustrating!
What happened
Well, some months ago, I bought quite a big load of items to resell and business was going nice, so I kept filling up my stock until Christmas more or less because then I decided to first get rid of what I had and then refocus on which items I'd restock.
Some of these items were sold under suspicious titles as in, using a bunch of keywords that would make them stand out in the crowd and maybe fooling people they sold an expensive brand items for a fraction of the price. I never bought anything for that reason simply because I don't know which items are inspired by such expensive brands, I'm not brand oriented at all with these things as I just buy something because I like it not because of a brand name attached to it.
But I had a few items in my cart that I loved a lot because the quality stood out, and they sold like hot cakes, so I had my suspicions that they may be inspired by the big brand. As I wasn't restocking them anytime soon anyway, there was no issue and I didn't dig into it. I never advertised my items as being one of the expensive brands, I know a lot of others do though.
My health was a bit of a priority over most other stuff, I had to refocus on everything for some time and so I didn't focus on selling at all.
Counterfeit items
Then I received a bunch of emails overnight about an item that I bought that was probably counterfeit. Sigh, it didn't stop with that one night of emails, no, for at least a week straight, every night I could set the clock and more emails started to come in. I believe for every single item they send me an email, and it's not easy to figure out about which item they speak because of the stupid titles they use, that contain like 25 keywords so it can be one of many I bought.
But the emails stated that I could get a refund if I believe it was correct so I started to filter out some of the items that I already got refunded because I was not happy with the quality at the time and some others that were totally different than on the pictures.
At the moment of writing this, I'm left with 75 emails I think of which a few are underway to be refunded after returning them and a few are refunded without returning them. I yet have to figure out which ones are the latter though because I'm now hours in customer support chat, spread over 4 days or so and I don't know where I stand at all.
Support level
I used to love the customer support using AI when some items was not living up to expectations, no long chats were needed, just send a message and either receive a return label and get refunded or for small cheap items, get refunded without having to return them. I never bumped into issues in the past, until this happened.
As I said, it's very hard to navigate such emails if the titles are so closely connected and you don't have a visual with the email. Then on top of that, my many many orders make it almost impossible to navigate the order list because this order number contains orders from many different shops and often not all of the parts show up either. It's very frustrating and I start to wonder if this is worth the time at this point.
Every single time I open a support chat, I bump into the same stupid standard AI responses and when they ask me to attach screenshots, halfway through them, they say thanks, we have opened a case, this is the number and then my effort goes to waste because I was not done yet and am left with tons of emails that aren't attached in the case.
Clearly AI
Even though they keep saying the case will be handled by a senior member of the team, this is not what happens, in fact the support I receive afterwards by email is probably worse because it often contains a totally different item they attach to a link where I can open a case myself. I seriously wanted to pull out my hairs many times.
The last update is that (after sending it already twice, and receiving 20 more after this request) they need to have all the screenshots of the emails I recieved, but of course they only mean those that we spoke about in that particular chat, because if I send them all, the AI agent will not understand, mark my words.
I was smart to leave these chats open so at least I can now spend 30 mins or so to select all the emails that belong to these items and first send these back and hope for the best but gosh, I'm getting very fed up.
The future looking bright?
I know these agents will become smarter over time but that doesn't mean that I'm happy to know that in the future this is what it is, dealing with AI constantly for every complaint or other reason that you need customer support for.
I'm wondering if I end up getting the affected items refunded or that I give up at some point because I wasted so much time already.
What are your thoughts and experiences on this matter? Have you dealt with such customer support yourself? Did it go well? Do you see a decline in good support or not? Let me know in the comments if you want to share..
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