31–40 of 473 posts
People don't want a useless chat bots, more often than not they seem deliberately programmed to be obstructive. If you told it you wanted a refund for order xyz, and it immediately gave you a refund, I'm sure people would like it.
Which isn’t to say they can’t be helpful. I’d much rather chat with a bot than call a person, if the bot is capable of doing the things I need. The thing is nobody seems willing to let the system actually do anything except escalate to a person, so why bother?
~"because the chatbots aren't good enough" Chat bots are annoying due to potential inconsistency, having to guess the types of things you ask for, due to their latency, but they've made major advancements recently, and we are only beginning to see what's possible. If those companies using chat bots are failing to provide value, then they won't be competitive and they will go away. Why do we want to discourage them fr…
The difficulty is, this is obscured to the customer.
Let's say I have a broadband account in a country with competitors I can choose between (eg the UK, where I can have BT or Virgin). I've already chosen the best package for me. I'm ringing up after six months of good service to fix my intermittent line drop.
The chat bot is terrible and I have to wait until the problem goes away on its own.
Unfortunately for me, I can't just guarantee that switching to the other service will make a difference, because chat bots are not core service. I can compare broadband options and pick the best, and I'm already on that. Now I have to gamble that some combination of:
(broadband option) + (customer service) is higher than the one I'm on.
Unfortunately for me, I have no way of checking this. There's every chance that I'll end up on a worse broadband option and a worse customer service option.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Amazon. My personal best time for a full refund was slightly under 2 minutes. It may be that having a long standing account, not claiming every delivery has been "lost" and rarely returning products makes me appear unlikely to be the usual customer asking for a refund.
If I’m not mistaken Amazon basically has a reputation for customers that is intended to penalize bad actors (and conversely reward good actors).
I also suspect that the majority of refund requests are fraudlent, so if they dont have a reputation scoring system for their customers they are stupid.
> Instead, the reason people go to customer service is because of a question that’s so specific, or complicated, or gnarly in some respect, that there’s no way the app will have the answer: you need a human. I can see the author probably hasn't done much customer service? I'd say maybe 1% of customer queries go in that direction. I agree dealing with a bot in that situation sucks, but a big chunk of customer question…
This is why large companies end up hiring thousands of low-wage workers who are prohibited by their software from sending anything but a pre-written response. The first-level agents can't even edit it. They can only send you something someone else wrote for the common situation.
Chat bots could easily replace these workers, and the customer experience would be better for it.
You will (probably) always still need the higher level agents who are really tech support, the ones who can identify when someone's report really is a bug and get it reported to engineers for fixing.
Those aren't the low-level agents in these outsourced call centers, though. Even if those people do recognize an issue, they can't do anything until they've sent you some number of generic responses that haven't satisfied you.
At least the bot could be trained to customize responses within a set of parameters and match the tone of the asker.
But I really dig airline chatbots. I rebooked flights quite easily in the past with that. It gave me clear options, I could scroll the list of flights etc., way better than by phone. And at inconvenient times as well, so no hotline anyway.
That way I changed a very unpleasant being stranded for 2h in a hotel room in Geneva for a nice long stay in a five star hotel. Landing at 1, being in the hotel at 2 at night. Flight was scheduled for 6 something in the morning. This would've been gruelsome. So I rebooked my flight to Frankfurt for lunch and enjoyed the breakfast buffet.
In my experience they're useless because they're trained / limited to the FAQ and website you've already read to try to resolve your issue. The same with calling a helpline. Yes, I'm aware I can check your website for common questions. I'm calling you and need to speak to a human because the answer isn't there .
The first layer of support at larger companies is usually restricted by their software from sending you anything but a pre-written response, just because you're such a rarity.
People don't want a useless chat bots, more often than not they seem deliberately programmed to be obstructive. If you told it you wanted a refund for order xyz, and it immediately gave you a refund, I'm sure people would like it.
You can provide that with a simple HTML form though.
Chat bots will take over more and more, but only to save money, not to improve the customer experience. I do get that some people call in with the simplest of question or problems, but for the people who call in with actual issues, I doubt that companies will even grant the bots the freedom they'd need. Customer service people already aren't given the freedom and autonomy needed to help customers, so why should bot get it?
Say you call in to an ISP to have your internet connection fixed, is the ISP going to give a bot free-range to make adjustments in backends or dispatching technicians? I doubt it. All this is going to do for the companies that implement it is that they'll save a bit of money and have the bots hide any underlying issues or errors on policies.
Honestly, I've heard that for a regular user chat bots are amazing. Tech people are just bunch of nerds who are used to going through documentation. For a regular grandma it's so much easiser to just write like she's used to.
The overwhelming majority (like 98% or more) of support requests are from people who have not read the documentation and are asking about something that is well-covered within it.
Chat bots can't (currently) eliminate the agents who exercise critical thought and report bugs, but for any company large enough to outsource "tier one" support to a call center overseas, the chat bot would actually be a big improvement.
Typically chatbots that I interact with are just attempting to steer me back towards FAQs. I don’t need a different interface to search your documentation in an attempt to keep me on the cheap customer service path and away from the expensive customer service path. Which isn’t to say they can’t be helpful. I’d much rather chat with a bot than call a person, if the bot is capable of doing the things I need. The thing…
It was basically guess the verb. And also not obvious when you're talking to a human through the exact same interface.
It's a menu system but harder to use.