Case Study: When Google Customer Support Becomes Generative AI Slop
- Anecdotes, Business, Psychology
When you have an issue with a product or service and try to reach customer support for it, would you rather deal with a frustrating automated system designed to filter out callers, being constantly redirected from department to department without resolution, dealing with an agent that clearly don't know what they're talking about or care to understand your problem, long waiting times, or not be able to reach anyone at all?
Would you believe me that by contacting Google's customer support, I experienced all of these issues simultaneously? No thanks to their apparent deployment of generative AI, I had the most miserable customer support experience in my entire life with many hours wasted, and as of this writing the issue is still ongoing and will likely never be resolved.
Allow me to describe a very concrete example that I lived through of how badly things can go wrong when embedding current generative AI technology into production environments, and how it can completely erode customer trust even when only relatively minor issues result from it.
Background
I am the not-so-proud owner of a Google Pixel 7a phone that I had purchased directly from the Google Store. Unfortunately, that particular model suffers from a widespread battery swelling issue. In the case of my particular phone, the symptoms have been very rare but sudden heating bursts during normal usage, and the back cover separating from its base. To handle this issue, Google has been offering an extended repair program for the Pixel 7a.
Problems started when I actually tried to use this extended repair program. There were basically three different compensation options being offered to me:
- Getting a battery replacement in a local authorized shop for free.
- Getting a partial credit on the Google Store to purchase a new Pixel phone.
- Getting a partial cash refund for an amount less than the credit one.
The credit option was an obvious no-go for me because the Pixel line of products has been plagued with many widespread defects for a while now. I was interested in the partial refund option, however the partner Google chose to execute the refunds, Payoneer, stopped providing services to Quebec residents since last September, rendering that option impossible for me. The remaining option therefore was the local shop battery replacement, except I called 4 different authorized shops in my area in 4 different cities and none of them had the required components to perform the repair, and as they had trouble securing inventory it was basically first come, first serve with no waiting list.
Therefore, I tried to contact Google's customer support in the hopes of finding an alternative solution that would solve the issue in my particular case.
Google offered me 3 ways to contact customer support: email, text chat and scheduling a phone call. Based on my interactions, all 3 involved generative AI, and all 3 were equally bad for the same reasons.
Generative AI issues
I wrote back in 2023 an article about quality issues in generative AIs. Since then, models got bigger and more expensive, but not much smarter, and all of the issues I mentioned back then are still very relevant.
As such, I will describe my experience based on the same list of issues I described in my original article.
Misinformation
Unsurprisingly, all of the responses I got from Google's customer support were full of falsehoods. This included:
- Suggesting a 4th compensation option, mailing in my phone for repairs, which was not available to Canadian customers, and kept suggesting it to me even after I highlighted this fact.
- Claiming that they do not have the rights to read my other customer support tickets, but still claiming to try anyways.
- Putting me on hold for several minutes during a phone call for no reason.
- Telling me that they have reached out to some department and that they will contact me again once they hear back from them. Of course, the name of the department changed every time, and I would only hear back once I replied myself.
- Being told multiple times that I'm not talking to a bot or that I won't be talking to a bot despite the obvious tells. (See below.)
Copyright infringement
While I cannot verify the sources that Google's AI received for training, one thing that I do wonder is whether the voice being produced during phone calls is from someone that authorized its use or not.
Data leakage
To give credit where credit is due, Google asked me to allow their phone call to be recorded in order to improve their services. While I cannot verify that my denial has been honored, at least I appreciated that someone considered giving the option at all.
Unoriginality
Regardless of the communication method that I was using, I was being told the exact same things over and over and over again. The wording would slightly change, but it was obviously minor derivatives of the same base message every time. Even the names of the agents were almost identical. Heck, I even got placeholders in text chat. It got so bad that it basically just ignored my replies at some point and started repeating itself, ignoring the facts after seemingly acknowledging them.
The weirdest AI tell had occurred during my phone call with them. It turned out that while I wasn't saying anything, the AI tried to generate some audio anyway, and it basically sounded like there was a ghost on the other side of the line, which is an extremely odd experience.
Copyrightability
I don't think the copyrightability of the customer service's output is of much relevance in this case, but I'm not a lawyer so don't quote me on that.
Manipulability
It appeared that Google put decent guardrails in order to prevent their agents from performing unauthorized actions and going off-script. The problem is that since it was basically just following a script at that point, it completely defeated its own purpose over traditional automated solutions.
The one thing I constantly tried is to see if I would be able to escalate the issue to an actual human, and after my interactions with their systems I strongly suspect that it is not capable of doing so.
Aftermath
My phone still suffers from a swelling battery. As of this writing, I'm not even seeing the battery replacement option anymore on Google's website anymore, so I suspect the battery is no longer in production. I would like to go to small claims court over this, but it would cost me more to open a case than the money I believe I am entitled to, and I don't think a judgment would be enforceable anyway due to jurisdiction issues.
There's one thing that I absolutely know for sure though, and it's that I am not planning to do business with Google any time soon except for their free services, and I had started to limit even those ones as much as possible. Google has had numerous issues over the years, but I at least expected above-average products and services and an acceptable customer support for paying customers. Not anymore.
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