Salesforce AI faces backlash from customers

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff bragged about a month ago about how he was able to lay off 4,000 support employees and replace them with artificial intelligence. 

He said 50% of customer service work is done by AI agents and 50% by humans. According to Benioff, the customer service score is about the same as it was before the introduction of AI.

I worked in IT support, and I know it's nuts and bolts. The vast majority of issues that support agents deal with can be resolved by following a script. 

A script, in this context, refers to a set of steps that must be completed in order for the issue to be resolved. Knowing this, it is easy to imagine that support is the kind of work well suited for a bot, but in reality, the situation is not that simple.

A fundamental building block of any support system is good documentation. Theoretically, if a company can afford an excellent knowledge base portal with answers to nearly any problem, as well as scripts or forms that solve these problems, this kind of system would render the need for support almost nonexistent, even without AI being involved. 

Yet, that never happens.

Real-world IT problems need real people providing customer support

There are two groups of people who blow up that ideal solution to the support problem. The first group is the one that doesn't like following the script; they are special, and they "know stuff."

Unfortunately, in the real world, this presents as developers (I am dead serious) who are reluctant to reboot the router when they can't connect a company-issued laptop to the home Wi-Fi, or again, developers who want their password changed remotely on a machine that is not connected to the internet.

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Just as the ideal documentation/knowledge base solution can't eliminate the need for support personnel handling these types of people, AI can't, either.

The other group that's particularly vexing for IT support consists of people who are the other extreme — afraid of tech and afraid they'll mess something up. They need to hear a voice that tells them everything will be OK if they follow the script. Trusting the bots isn't something that fits their worldview.

Salesforce pushes AI tech support on its customers

According to the help request ticket “Bring Back Search on Salesforce Help,” opened on Salesforce's ideaexchange September 29, Salesforce removed the search function from its help documentation.

The request, opened by user Tom Bassett, says:

Search has been replaced with Agentforce which can produce unreliable results and takes longer to find the information you need. Turning Search back on would enable a UI that can be used to find trusted results and would give the power back to users as to whether they want to search using text or a conversation.

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Currently, the support request has more than 600 upvotes, and although this number doesn't look that large compared to other support tickets, there are two reasons. 

First, the request is fairly new. Second, there is an easy workaround that most people have likely tried: using Google to search the documentation.

Annoyed Salesforce CRM customers have left many angry comments:

“10x the time it takes to find the easiest of answers, half the time with Agentforce complaining it can only answer questions related to Salesforce because it doesn't know how to answer my question,” wrote Jason Skowronek.

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“If anyone at Salesforce is seeing this, please stop forcing Agentforce on everyone, in every situation," added Leonardo Paulo de Macedo. "It's getting annoying for everyone, including...customers.”

User Vanessa Grant wrote: “It is so infuriating that Salesforce wants to abandon things THAT CURRENTLY WORK in favor of something that (a) doesn't work as well in many cases, (b) uses up more energy/water to accomplish the same task that a library of searchable information could do, and (c) takes longer.”

Takeaways from backlash against Salesforce's AI-driven IT support:

• AI and search being mutually exclusive doesn't make sense, unless Salesforce is trying to boost AI interaction numbers.
• It is difficult to imagine AI providing any meaningful support if it can't even replace the search function in the help documentation.

Salesforce isn’t first company to anger customers with AI tech support

Klarna, the Swedish fintech firm, replaced most of its customer service staff with AI agents. In May, it decided to start rehiring humans, due to declining service quality and growing customer dissatisfaction. 

According to Forbes, Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski recognized that a focus on cost-cutting led to poorer service and emphasized that human interaction is essential for customer satisfaction.

Another company that faced a similar problem is the Australian Commonwealth Bank, which reversed its decision to replace 45 customer service employees with AI bots. 

Instead of reducing the number of calls handled by humans, the bots were overwhelmed, and team leaders had to start taking calls, reported ABC News.

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