I share your skepticism but it does seem like the author addressed 1 and 3:
> When a caller asks something that isn’t in the knowledge base, the AI doesn’t guess. It tells the caller it doesn’t have that information, asks for their name and a good callback number, and saves that to MongoDB. Dane gets a list of callbacks to return — no lost leads.
> The escalation path is not an edge case — it’s a core feature.
I haven't been a service advisor before, but if it's anything like working the phones at other retailers, you get a lot of the same questions over and over again, and a bot could certainly answer those things correctly.
> The phone rings, he can’t answer, the customer hangs up and calls someone else. That’s a lost job — sometimes a $450 brake service, sometimes a $2,000 engine repair — just gone because no one picked up.
Sure, that's a problem, but...
> Dane gets a list of callbacks to return — no lost leads.
Yeah. So. I'm still going to hang up, phone somewhere else, and you get no business. I'm also doubly annoyed because not only did you waste my time speaking to a computer, it couldn't answer the question so I'm now worse off than if you'd ignored the call.
Yeah - this scenario presupposes that if I need my car fixed I'm going to wait for you to give me a call back, rather than continue working down my list.
The AI doesn’t have to solve every problem to solve some problems. If it can answer 10% of questions, isn’t that 10% better than having all of them go to voicemail unanswered?
The data the bot has to work with is stated to already be available the website.
Therefore, I'd never call on the phone to find those answers -- but those are the only answers the bot has to offer.
The only reason I'd ever call is for answers that the website (and therefore, the bot) does not provide. Calling on the phone and getting a bot that insists on giving me data that I already have would only serve to waste my time and frustrate me.
It would probably frustrate me enough to hang up and call a different shop immediately, and name-and-shame the place.
I know how to Google shit. By the time I start dialing telephone numbers, I've already Googled this shit.
When I call a local shop I want to talk to someone at that local shop (or at very least, their voicemail) -- not a regurgitating bot.
But, again, that's just me.
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So I'm imagining my dad, who's in his mid-70s and has never Googled a single thing in his entire life. At least superficially, he sounds like an ideal candidate that can be helped with this automated receptionist.
Except: When he calls the shop and has to talk to the bot instead of a person or their voicemail, he's also definitely hanging up immediately and calling the next place on his list. This doesn't help him at all, nor does it help the shop.
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For the shop, the cost of frustrated people who vent to their friends about the experience may very well be higher the cost of not always being available to answer the phone.
There is no way to ensure that the AI doesn't guess. You can do all the prompting and RAG you want but sometimes it's just going to make shit up and ignore instructions
It might be the same calls if you work at a shop that only works on one model year vehicle doing a set of services. Note that services are not repairs.
> When a caller asks something that isn’t in the knowledge base, the AI doesn’t guess. It tells the caller it doesn’t have that information, asks for their name and a good callback number, and saves that to MongoDB. Dane gets a list of callbacks to return — no lost leads.
> The escalation path is not an edge case — it’s a core feature.
I haven't been a service advisor before, but if it's anything like working the phones at other retailers, you get a lot of the same questions over and over again, and a bot could certainly answer those things correctly.