Customer Service

“As I spend more, more time in there, I very quickly realized that it's not that big of a TAM and that world is ending very, very fast. On the other side, Sharath had spent a lot of time in Philippines in his previous job, so he convinced me that no, customer s…”

“Some jobs that are going to get displaced, and they already are, software engineering, customer service.”

“Customer service, frontline customer service, paralegals and maybe you'll still have paralegals, but document review, document generation, that type of stuff, that goes away. I think a lot of entry-level work goes away, and this is actually a bigger problem be…”

“I think my view is if you can find something where the customer service just absolutely sucks, it's a really good entry point.”

“We narrowed in obviously on the use case that is in most transformation, which is customer service particularly. And that's where Cost pressures are high, and that's where, you know, adoption or buying at least is there.”

“If AI can do customer service, it means it's going to be the cheap customer service. It's going to be the one that everyone gets. Because it's cheap and simple.”

“It was way too early. And frankly, I still don't think it's a solved. I still don't think that AI has kind of solved that. And I still do all my support by hand, although I am building out something to kind of Help with that automatically.”

“A really, really good service organization allows for very streamlined, efficient service for people who know exactly what they want, and extremely empathetic service for people who are undecided, uncertain, or find themselves in an unusual situation.”

“Customer service is this human powered factory, right? The metrics are ones of throughput and effort. It's like tickets today, per day, time to first response. You know, all of these things where you're measuring productivity, average handle time. In an AI wor…”

“If it's an easy landscape and we can cover the API estate with what we have, you could really get to 80 or a hundred percent depending on where you want to go. So as of today, it's all there. I think voice isn't quite there, and that's it.”

“This kind of reminds me of Jim Clayton, who said you can solve 90% of all legal problems with good customer service.”

“Maybe what we're describing is a bunch of swim lanes Have been established by random accidents of software and org charts and everything like that. You do customer service. When people come with a query as of a non-commercial nature, you are an SDR. You know, …”

“If everyone has the same improved customer service, it just ratchets the competition up. Right. And those numbers get passed back to you. Don't get to just like take all the money that we spend on customer service and be like, well, now we get that money. That…”

“The other property, which I think is a little underrated, is that it's very easy to go live. And I think a lot of Gen AI use cases are struggling with that right now, especially at the enterprise level, because there's risk involved, right? Like people don't w…”

“And those two things I think are one of the big reasons why it's probably the use case with the most traction at the enterprise. And coding is another one.”

“I actually think, like, maybe one thing, the one way to think about it is that, like, AI use case will start eating the spectrum from both ends. And the reason why is that because engineers are the highest paid, like, they have the sophistication to, like, rea…”

“Yeah, I mean, another specific dynamic is that at the enterprise, it's becoming a lot more of a top-down motion, so You know, in the past, any of these technologies could have been just, like, one team trying to vet it or decide it, but now it's like a, it's a…”

“I think before they tackle our space, there will probably be other spaces they have to tackle first. Yeah. Coding's probably one of them.”

“We have our customers See anywhere between 50 and 90% of their customer service interactions completely automated”

“And we believe that like this means that there will be a higher appreciation. And if a company wants to be competitive, it will actually be a competitive edge to offer a human connection.”

“You can have a bad product or a product that's it's seeing improvements in great customer service, and you have a company, but if you flip that equation, you got a great product and bad customer service, you don't have a company.”

“Customer service as a market, which is a sort of very sort of a bubbling market these days with AI. That's a trillion dollars a year spent on customer service globally.”

“And for what it's worth, I do believe you, the thing I think you can fire all the customer service people. The only miscalculation is those people do not work in the US. You're going to fire all the people in Indonesia.”

“I think we're very quickly about to reach a tipping point whereby the most performant reasoning model available in the world may be overkill for the average customer service use case.”

“And if, let's say, 10 years from now, no one has to do manual data entry again, or no one has to, you know, get yelled at on the other side of the line for an angry, like, person in customer service, I think that'll be a win for everybody. Yeah. And then all t…”

“Customer service is more directly in the crosshairs of even current AI capability to some degree. Like obviously you can make the case for like, well, every job is going to be affected or whatever, you know, who knows? But I think this is one where it's like, …”

“We cannot touch customer service. We cannot touch it because it's going to get commoditized and run over by these foundational models within a year.”

“And I think that the places where I've seen data abuse the most is in customer service.”

“I think genuinely customer service is very much in like the kill zone of AI or whatever. I think it's really you know, it's a very vulnerable space if you don't move with the times.”

“If you kind of walk through a corporation and say, if you make everybody 10 X more productive, how does that cause you to reorganize? And by the way, that doesn't cause you a whole lot of job loss. Some, you know, like I think customer service will both reorga…”

“And you find a lot of people in hospitality have about 70% of the skills you need for customer service.”

“We were talking to this company that spends 300,000 dollars a month on customer service reps. And what we modeled out is that using AI, you can actually get that to 25,000 dollars a month.”

“For scale companies, the rule is provide whatever service you can as long as it doesn't slow us down. And that may mean no service.”

“The paradigm of talking to your customers less, you know, is really, really born of an era where, People really weren't making as many data informed decisions. And it might have been because a lot of this information wasn't digitized to begin with. If you're r…”

“We noticed that when you are of a free or low tier plan on a SaaS product, you typically get horrible customer service because it's not cost effective to invest your employees time in communicating with these people because they're not bringing back the Financ…”

“The worst thing you can do from a customer service standpoint, and we learned this lesson very early, is just say nothing, honestly, and just go dark and, you know, under-communicate. That just frustrates people and always better to over-communicate.”