Isn't that the opposite though? Having a store for the customer to get face-to-face support is sometimes necessary even those who prefer it all to be online. It acts as a stop gap to people otherwise low support customers.
The newer upstarts you mention are self selecting for customers who would do everything they can to never make a support call. They are just another form of having a 15 minute wait time because online only is it's own customer service barrier.
No. In the case of cell phone carriers, the only times in the past 10 years I have ever darkened the door of a retail store is times when the carrier was too incompetent to let me get my problem solved another way. For instance, there was a time at AT&T where if you had acquired a brand new unlocked iPhone that needs eSIM, you needed to receive a physical piece of cardboard printed with a unique QR code on it in order to activate it successfully.
I’ve been with US Mobile for years now and never once felt the need for a physical store.
There's a lot of reasons for this. One of them is that it tends to be a lot cheaper to have one building in Denver to host support people than to have many buildings in every city.
Besides that concept, they're selling telephone and data services. It makes sense to -- you know -- make use of them.
When we had a telephone issue back in the landline days, we didn't load ourselves up into the car and go to a store to get help from someone in person; we instead used the phone.
(That may have been done by using the neighbor's phone, but whatever. We still have neighbors and not all of them are dicks. And these days, we still have cell phone stores for those who can't empty the water from a boot. The days of brick and mortar cell phone sales are not, at this time, numbered.)
With sims switching to e-sim there's basically no reason to have in person support for cellular service. There's nothing they can do, outside of what they can already do online or over the phone. Like, if you go to an AT&T store with a broken e-sim they can't wave a magic wand. They'll probably just reset it on their end, like they could do over the phone.
Some people just prefer going into a physical place and talking to someone in a face to face conversation they can understand. I’ll very rarely want to sit in a phone queue just to talk to “Jason” who has a thick Filipino accent sitting in a crowded support room talking through what sounds like a a 1kbps VOIP connection. And I’m never going to text chat an AI bot for help.
Contrast that to my kid who is horrified by in person interactions and thinks that the kiosks at McDonalds were the world’s greatest recent invention.
Not to mention people with disabilities that make one form of communication the only option.
People are different and good companies try to serve them all.
The person at the store has direct contact with the broken device, this is a much shorter feedback loop than telling you what to do, having you misinterpret it, having you read back the results, and then misinterpreting them.
The vast majority of humans across the planet aren’t making their money with their computer, which was the qualifier in the first line of my comment.
Furthermore, even if they did, the vast majority of them still won’t be using their computer to generate revenue - they’ll be using an employer-provided one and the things I’m talking about have nothing to do with them.
They still aren't learning. You're learning and then telling them to incorporate your learnings. They aren't able to remember this so you need to remind them each day.
That sounds a lot like '50 First Dates' but for programming.
Yes, this is something people using LLMs for coding probably pick up on the first day. They're not "learning" as humans do obviously. Instead, the process is that you figure out what was missing from the first message you sent where they got something wrong, change it, and then restart from beginning. The "learning" is you keeping track of what you need to include in the context, how that process exactly works, is up to you. For some it's very automatic, and you don't add/remove things yourself, for others is keeping a text file around they copy-paste into a chat UI.
This is what people mean when they say "you can kind of do "learning" (not literally) for LLMs"
While I hate anthropomorphizing agents, there is an important practical difference between a human with no memory, and an agent with no memory but the ability to ingest hundreds of pages of documentation nearly instantly.
The outcome is definitely not the same, and you need to remind them all the time. Even if you feed the context automatically they will happily "forget" it from time to time. And you need to update that automated context again, and again, and again, as the project evolves
I believe LLMs ultimately cannot learn new ideas from their input in the same way as they can learn it from their training data, as the input data doesn't affect the weights of the neural network layers.
For example, let's say LLMs did not have examples of chess gameplay examples in their training data. Would one be able to have an LLM play chess by listing the rules and examples in the context? Perhaps, to some extent, but I believe it would be much worse than if it was part of the training (which of course isn't great either).
The newer upstarts you mention are self selecting for customers who would do everything they can to never make a support call. They are just another form of having a 15 minute wait time because online only is it's own customer service barrier.
reply