The Rise of Support Bots

Automating customer support has ben the thing for the last 15 years. Or may be more. And has always been super annoying. But it seems recently the bots - mostly thanks to LLMs an much better backend integrations - have actually been quite good.

Not all of them of course, but there are some good examples. Revolut is - at least in my experience - leading the pack. I don't have too many issues with Revolut in general, but when I do, the only way to star resolving them is through the "Help" option in the App. And actually with my most recent issues - all of them have been resolved by the automated bot.

It is quite good on the front end - in the chat you can seamlessly add attachments and paste screenshots, which simplifies the process. It interprets images quite well. To the point that in many cases it is not even necessary to explain what the problem is - it gets it. But then it has also very good backend integrations. It can analyze the transaction history etc., and also make some corrective actions.

The other example is Clear - I described it in details several months ago. Actually the Clear bot has proven to be better than the Clear personnel that I was dealing with at the airport.

Airline bots - surprisingly - are not yet at this level. They are able to address problems that have simple solutions like rebook you to a next available flight when you miss a connection. But anything more complex (e.g., if the extended layover requires an overnight accommodation), they mostly give up. Also during widespread airline network disruptions (like a major airport shutdown), they typically hit the compute capacity ceiling and completely give up.

The trend is clear though: the mundane jobs of support agents are being taken over by machines. And the machines have gradually become better and better. The most lagging parts are the backend integrations. Even Revolut, which absolutely aims to have everything easily accessible in the app, falls back to an embedded web view hosting a 3rd party website, when for example filing an insurance claim. This quickly becomes very tedious to interact with, as the other service is not really optimized for interactions from a small screen with fat fingers.