tl;dr I will probably not be purchasing a Gradient All-Weather Window Mounted Heat Pump, and you probably shouldn’t either.
I have now had the dubious pleasure of interacting with a customer “service” representative which I strongly suspect to be either entirely an LLM or a human relying ~entirely on an LLM.
Given the fact that I’m making this post, and what its title is, to say that I was dissatisfied with the experience would be an understatement.
If there really were a person on the other end of this interaction, I would describe the experience as like talking with an undergrad who skimmed the reading right before class, can’t recognize when they’re being asked a question which requires them to reason and potentially call on outside information that is not directly in front of them, and refuses to acknowledge that they’re unprepared.
And in general this is the core problem with using LLMs in this context. Customer service has two primary purposes: To provide a human interface to existing material for customers who prefer that, who can’t access the existing material, or who can but can’t navigate or understand it; and, exception handling. Exception handling breaks down into two sub-categories: Known exceptions, and unknown exceptions (with apologies to Mr. Rumsfeld).
LLMs, pretty much by their nature, cannot be trusted to handle unknown exceptions, because unknown exceptions are definitionally outside their training data. I would also be surprised to discover that they were particularly good at handling known exceptions without significant work on the part of the people deploying them. (Also the downside risk here is high, as in the Air Canada case where an LLM customer support system made up a bereavement policy—a known exception—and the courts rightly forced Air Canada to honor it.)
Anyway, after wasting too many of the limited seconds of my very human and all-too-short life on this presumptive LLM, I decided that the best disincentive to Gradient, the subject of today’s post, continuing this practice, and the best disincentive to other companies adopting it, was public shaming.
Honestly it’s probably for the best, as Gradient’s products are incredibly expensive compared to other consumer HVAC products, as well as poorly reviewed by other early adopters.
I will, of course, update this post if I get in touch with an actual human, and not a steaming pile of matrix math pretending to be a human, but at this point I’m not holding my breath.
Without further ado, I present, Who’s On First? Novel Consumer HVAC Product Edition.
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