The author argues that customers do not actually want chat bots for customer service, contrary to what companies claim. Chat bots can only handle simple, routine queries, but for complicated issues customers want to speak to a human representative. Companies are pushing chat bots to reduce costs and increase profits, without considering the negative impact on customer experience. The author only sees chat bots as useful for customers when used to cancel subscriptions that require contacting customer service, showing how frustrating the current system is. The author believes we should build technology that customers actually want and would appreciate, rather than focusing on bad experiences or defending against them.
I would prefer a documentation site with a fuzzy finder, where I can search terms and the articles are well written, and If I don’t find my answer I would like to contact a real person. Chatbots are very inconvenient for finding information, and they are also slow. Maybe something like this https://support.system76.com/, https://wiki.archlinux.org/, https://wiki.archlinux.org/. good docs save more time that those crappy chatbots, and a way to have a cal with a real human. (Maybe chatbots if they were something like chat gpt)
I agree that I absolutely do not want a chat bot and that getting in touch with a human who knows what theyre doing is more important.
That said I’ve also worked a job where I manned the little chat box on a website by myself and I was consecutively talking to like 13 people at the same time for 8 hours. It was not fun, and while I did what I could to help people there were times I wasnt as fast to respond and that I didnt give people as much help as I could. There were also times when the the question was super simple and it saved the customer time on hold for nothing.
I’ve also seen chat windows on websites that are pushed out to underpaid overworked people in third world countries where they are so stuck to the script that it might as well be a robot. Overall I think chat windows on websites for anything serious arent great, human or otherwise, though they should be better. In some cases the bots may improve experience, but I dont like that it’ll just lead to cutting their customer service crew further.
I’ve done chat at my internal IT job, and I’ve been talking to 5 people troubleshooting, with me remoted into 2 of there computers and it is insane
A decent chatbot will be able to handle the most common transactions in a conversational way similar to a person, and will automatically escalate to a human when they get out of their depth. But most chatbots are unfortunately not good.
I have never interacted with one of those chat bots that didn’t lead to me just speaking to a representative anyway. Why the extra steps.
Yup. Chatbots can in every case be replaced by a knowledgebase articles/a wiki, and a self-service portal. Give me those and a support email in case I do need to speak with a real person. I don’t under any circumstances want to talk with a chatbot.
In my country they are thinking about putting chat bot on the emergency line (same as 911 call for reference).
So no…when I call I want help, not a chat bot with limited options, no empathy and that will probably desconect my call if I choose the wrong option.
Wtf, which country are you in?
Portugal
https://24.sapo.pt/atualidade/artigos/tecnologia-do-chatgpt-vai-gerir-atendimento-de-chamadas-do-112-em-2025 It is in portuguese, but I think google can translate the webpage
Doesn’t Portugal have really high unemployment? How could this possibly be warranted?
Probably some “friend” of the main party (we call it boys do PS) will get an huge sum to do it…and in the end it will not work properly.
Our goverment does not care. We have an huge problem with nepotism and corruption. In my opinion this is not to improve thr citizen life, is to give money to some boys cooperation.
Also, the unemployment rate covers people without studies or with specific studies not suited for 911 operator. I dont know how it is in other countries, but here the first responder is a police officer and only after him it goes to a registered nurse or health profissional. We are lacking profissionais on both fields. But in the end I would rather have someone without studies but trained to be an 911 operator than a chatbot.
When this news came people started talking about the women who called 911 ordering a pizza. The operator managed to understand the caller was in danger and the pizza call was a code for help. A chatbot can do this??? I dont think so.
I would think that an unemployed person with decent communication skills could be trained to be an operator who would be much better than a chatbot. Point taken about corruption though, that makes sense sadly.
That would bring fear to my life. I have not had any good chat box experiences and certainly would not want one during a potential emergency. Some countries - perhaps most - have a dedicated line for real emergencies and a separate line for non emergency calls. I would be frustrated if the officials put a chatbot on either of them.
Currently they’re stupid, and their grasp on coherence just isn’t there. They “drift” in a way. They’re like compulsive liars and confabulators, just rattling off speech without any sense of responsibility to ensure it’s true.
It’s a bit like having a conversation with a toddler, to be honest. They’ll link together concepts that have no business being together and speak as if they’re the rational ones. It won’t stay that way though—chat bots are evolving at a frightening speed because the capitalists have learned if you can pretend to be a person on the internet, you can buy votes.
Ah yes, the powerful rich. Whom people for some reason call “capitalists”, as if there hasn’t been a fantastically wealthy elite class in every economic system ever including every socialist experiment.
How the hell did we segue to capitalism from inane chatbots?
If a chat bot can answer any question that is answered by its documentation – and can shunt me to a human (instead of hallucinating the answer) when the documentation does not have the answer – I say BRING ON THE CHATBOTS
It will not shunt you to a human. Its entire purpose is to replace human customer support representatives.
Half the “support chat bots” I’ve talked to is just a paraphrased version of searching their support article database. If it’s not in there I pretty much have to talk to a real agent.
That said I don’t think companies would want chatbots that could do more than that, at least for the time being.
They could end up being convinced into giving me an 80% VIP discount without the company’s consent.
E: fixed a they’re i was tired this morning
Yeah, you’re right on a lot of chatbots just being paraphrased responses from the support database, but for a lot of people, that’s all they want or need. There are a great number of people who just don’t want to read the entire article to find their answer. For that, I don’t really mind chatbots because I get the use case. What I hate is when there isn’t an option to go to the next tier of support without going in circles forever with the stupid bot.
Most chatbots are speed bumps. Like phone menu trees and hold times, they slow you down on your way to get actual help.
Sometimes that means you give up before getting to the real help, which saves money on support.
Whether it’s the intended effect or not, it is so well known at this point that we shouldn’t excuse anyone using this tactic. It’s malicious.
I used to design and maintain chatbots for a living, for a company that among other things sold bespoke chatbots to corporate clients, and I can tell you that the companies KNOW that customers don’t want chatbots for customer service. They don’t care. THEY want chatbots for customer service because chatbots are orders of magnitude cheaper than hiring customer service representatives.
A chatbot is gonna cost what it costs them to employ 1-2 customer service reps, but it can handle basically infinite traffic for that price. The GOOD ones handle the simple questions (your "how do I pay my bill"s and your "what are your hours"s) and then forward the difficult ones (“why is my bill fucked up?”) to a human agent. But I absolutely worked with some clients (who I will not name because I do not want to get sued) that explicitly wanted to avoid letting customers get access to a human agent by whatever means possible.
Also a side note but basically no one lets people cancel accounts via chatbot. They inevitably want THOSE requests to go to a human rep so they can try to talk them out of it.
Customer service chatbots are useful for helping someone use natural language to find an answer that already exists in the documentation/FAQ. I imagine this must be useful for a non-zero number of people who find it difficult to troubleshoot issues using an FAQ.
Personally, my first port-of-call is always to go to the documentation/FAQ myself to look for the answer. I will only use a chat service if I cannot find the answer. So having a chatbot trying to suggest me solutions from the documentation is always very disruptive and annoying because it’s just forcing me to press “no this doesn’t answer my question” enough times until it actually connects me to a human… if I’m lucky.
I think there is value pursuing and researching the technology more. For the benefit of people who aren’t like me and struggle troubleshooting issues on their own. It can be useful for helping with routine queries and allows for existing customer service personnel focus on the more complex issues. As it stands at the moment almost every customer service chatbot I have encountered has been a negative experience for me.
You know, if they just marketed the chatbots as a natural language way to engage with written product documentation (“what does error d80 mean and how do I fix it?”) I think that’s attractive to customers. It’s when they are presented as a replacement for a human and a barrier to getting real answers that they are a real pain.
I think the worst application of chat bots is when they replace a form that is served on a webpage. I don’t know why anyone thinks this is a good idea but I’ve seen it a lot.
When I contact customer service I almost never want information, I want them to do something. As long as the bots can’t actually make anything happening, they are just a waste of my time. And that’s why I don’t like them
Yeah when someone decides they need help, they don’t want to traverse a tree of questions that more often than not end with something obvious you’ve done. Also, you want a real person to empathize with you frustration
