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Klarna says its AI assistant does the work of 700 people after it laid off 700 people
(www.fastcompany.com)
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this post was submitted on 28 Feb 2024
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Klarna: "Customers rate the AI assistant the same as the Human support workers" [all non-responses]
@Lmaydev@programming.dev exactly this in the comment above!
When Klarna says "customer ratings of the AI are the same as for human workers", what on earth do they mean?
It also contradicts the experiences people have been having with GPT powered chatbots recently. A model that takes a few prompts to start hallucinating is better than a living breathing human being? Really? I'd be curious to give it a try.
I worked for large companies before, and I even interviewed for Klarna (they have been hiring lots recently, maybe for different tasks/positions), and they always lie. Always.
At one company I worked at before, some KPI was calculated incorrectly and had been for years. When we informed the relevant person of this, they got very defensive and refused to change it. Only our team knew the calculation was total BS. It was become success/money was at stake for him. This person continued to send the fake KPI calculations to everyone every week.
I got laid off from the company where I work with absolutely ZERO motivation as to how me being laid off would increase "efficiency" (even though that was their claim
they are slimming down the company to increase "efficiency"). The company ignored every piece of evidence I provided to show that me and my team are completely overworked and that they should probably cut jobs elsewhere if they don't want all of our data ingestions and ML models to collapse.
I don't think companies have enough to motivate such a layoff if they can't solidify their numbers and make then transparent to the public. I'd certainly like to see the union fights Klarna will have with the Swedish worker unions now. I have never been to such a meeting though, but I've provided motivation for the union to use to oppose layoffs in such meetings - my understanding is that it's a bit of a shit show.
Yeah… we’re having this with one of our suppliers right now…
We’re showing them all the issues they aren’t solving and they’re saying “look all our KPI numbers look amazing”
So now we have to explicitly go into each ticket and mark it as dissatisfied, since they don’t take into account how long the ticket was open, how many meetings had to be called over the ticket, etc. just whether it was closed without clicking the extra “we’re dissatisfied” button
That sucks. A rigid KPI that is never open to change and only made to show some BLING in meetings, it will always lead to failure.
And when the KPIs are bad, they blame us. We had lots of failures in streaming videos on our platform and it was growing across a range of mobile OSs and devices, and they would just say, very sternly, "We need you to deliver better results!". Meanwhile, they had us do a huge migration and rebuild the entire UI across all devices all while maintaining the legacy systems that are sometimes riddled with bugs. Fucking idiots! They shouldn't expect X performance with Y² the number of tasks (I would have said 2*Y if it was "double" the work... it was more like being on steroids, it was Y² the work, everyone was burnt out, people barely took the summer off). We met those KPIs by a margin previously, and we're not about to meet them now unless they hire more staff or give us more time until their new UI launch. Spoiler: the launch did not go well.
Yeah, that’s always been my experience with KPIs, too.
It’s always turned into a game for managers - they don’t have the ability to actually improve the product, so the measurements change or they add an extra field in the ticket…
My first job was as a cashier and we were trained to press the calculate button on the register after each item we scanned. Did that make the checkout go faster? Nope. Did it make their measurement look better? Yeah, since that wasn’t “checkout time” in their report
At another job, patches weren’t merged fast enough. So, instead of making any changes that would improve the product, we were ordered to make one ticket for investigating the problem and a second for integrating the fix. It made fixing issues slower, but their KPIs went up…
You assume support agents don't hallucinate
🤣 yeah true
I feel like customer service has been on a decline for the past 10 years or so. I owe it to being underpaid and treated badly as an employee. .