AI Customer Support for SaaS

Ask HN: Will low quality AI customer support be the new normal?

Hacker News · 0-bad-sectors · Posted May 10, 2026 · Reviewed September 1, 2026

“Now whenever I reach for customer's support chat or phone I get an AI agent replying to me and I get into a useless loop for a couple of minutes before I start begging it to link me to a real person.”

He describes the shape the entry names: not a missing chatbot, but a chatbot placed in front of the queue he was trying to reach. The thread argues with itself, and a reader should see that before treating it as demand. Some replies defend deflection outright, on the grounds that a balance query should never reach a person; several others expect the whole complaint to age out as the models improve. The reservation that matters most is one reply's arithmetic: it prices offshore voice support against an agent and concludes the agent wins even once you subtract the customers it drives away, which describes companies choosing this deliberately rather than lacking a tool to buy. Note also who is being complained about. Every company named is a large consumer brand, and the entry above sells to SaaS. Ten of its thirty-five top-level replies are flagged, dead or deleted.