New Rivian AI Assistant for service requests: frustration

[R1Yes]

While our R1S was in for service, the service center unfortunately didn’t fix a couple things and caused some cosmetic damage. We were asked by Rivian support to file new service requests in the app, one for each issue.

This task used to be simple: Give the request a title, add some details, upload a photo, submit.

Now there’s an AI chatbot that requires an “interview” where it tries to guess what’s wrong and provide a fix. In my 30 minutes trying—and failing—to file the first of six tickets, it couldn’t understand basic requests, and it didn’t provide any way to bypass it and let me simply enter details.

After being asked innumerable irrelevant questions, I finally gave up and called the support line. They said there’s no way to avoid the AI chatbot other than calling in and having an agent transcribe your descriptions into new tickets on their end.

I love our Rivian, but service has been by far our least favorite aspect of ownership. This AI chatbot took the best part of the service experience—an easy way to create and document service issues—and made it absolutely terrible. (To be fair, maybe our experience was worse because our tickets were relating to damage or issues not fixed, rather than new issues. But the fact that I couldn’t even file the tickets was incredibly frustrating.)

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[Electrified Outdoors]

I don't like it at all. Customer should have the option of using the AI chatbot or manually entering in their request info.

The AI chatbot saves Rivian from having to review it and contact the customer but makes the process more frustrating and time consuming for the customer.

 

[COdogman]

So in other words it works as well as every other AI “agent” out there…

 

[Donald Stanfield]

I understand Rivian's position of trying to find ways to reduce labor and time spent, but this isn't the way to do it. Rivian's service communication system needs an overhaul, which would solve their problem far better than any chatbot could. If they were able to efficiently log customer requests instead of playing a game of telephone between the CSRs and the service department, it would save the time as well.

What needs to happen is the central dispatch routes the requests directly to the service centers instead of playing middleman.

 

[raylepper]

AI. Uh huh. I've been using chatgpt quite a bit for various coding and such. The most amazing (and frightening) thing is when I point out an obvious error and it responds happily with, "You're absolutely right! Let me try that again." AI agents don't care if they give bad advice or do a shitty job. So when a company consigns its customer experience to an 'agent' that doesn't care about delivered quality, well...Can't wait until they start flying airplanes and doing brain surgery.

 

[Riviot]

Well this is fun...

I'm concerned this layer of difficulty is intentional in reducing work orders for minor things, as only something major would make someone pick up a phone and call.

 

[raylepper]

One of the things I learned in business is that if your customers really love you, you can screw up pretty often (and occasionally pretty badly) and still keep the business. Sadly for me, my competitor at the time understood this while I didn't. I focused on making perfect product; he focused on being loved. At the end of the day, his business grew much larger than mine. Rivian certainly benefits from the love thing. I hope they don't take it for granted. As the old saying goes, people do business with people. Or at least they used to.

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