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Customers don't want chat bots

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Re: Customers don't want chat bots

#131

Post by JohnFen »

mduggles wrote: post #32

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…

Exactly, yes. I never use the chat support (whether robotic or manned) because if I'm at the point where that's necessary, I'm at the point where I need to talk to a human being personally.

Re: Customers don't want chat bots

#132

Post by est »

> that there’s no way the app will have the answer ... Hey, my credit card isn’t working, and maybe it’s because of a weird charge I had on it yesterday, but then something else happened right before this purchase” – that’s the sort of complicated scenario

Hmm, what makes OP think a chatgpt can't answer this question? Given enough tokens passed to a ChatGPT session, a chatbot can eventually find out what's going on and provide a simple to understand explaination.

Re: Customers don't want chat bots

#133

Post by pessimizer »

kristopolous wrote: post #127
nehal3m wrote: post #103

Typically I call customer service because I'm trying to tackle a problem that cannot be solved by using their normal interface. There is usually some subtlety or exception that requires an agent capable of understanding them at the other end, otherwise I wouldn't have bothered calling. Chatbots almost by definition cannot deal with that, at least I've never experienced one ever. And I imagine that if they can underst…

Right. You contact a human because you want a guarded administrative action to be taken. For all the impressiveness of these chat bots, I think people are still skeptical and hesitant to give it levers that are actually connected to things. It's hard to hold a computer program accountable in any nuanced way when it starts misbehaving other than kicking it to the curb

> For all the impressiveness of these chat bots, I think people are still skeptical and hesitant to give it levers that are actually connected to things.

They don't want a person to escalate you either, but you can pressure a person in ways that a chatbot cannot be pressured. At least a person (and their employer) wants to get you off the phone; the person because they're sick of being yelled at and coming up with reasons not to escalate, and their employer because they're paying for the time spent.

A chatbot is happy to talk you in circles all day, and costs near nothing. Empowering chatbots is not the point, one of the advantages of chatbots is that they can be disempowered more easily than humans.

Re: Customers don't want chat bots

#134

Post by ye-olde-sysrq »

mduggles wrote: post #32

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…

Yeah this is my take too. Chat bots are usually transparently obviously something the CTO bought, then Support dumped some basic configuration into it, and now it's a glorified redirect-provider to poorly map english questions to help articles. There's 0 vertical integration and it's purely to try to shunt traffic down cheaper support channels.

I've literally had 1 good experience with bot-based support. Exactly one. It was when I forgot I had used my Lowes' store card that month and they charged me a late fee for missing a payment. I went through the chatbot UI because I couldn't figure out how to even begin to contact human support.

And can you imagine my utter shock and disbelief when the bot offered to waive the late fee if I set up autopay? Holy shit! I'm still in awe. The chatbot waived my fee. It actually DID something. It genuinely saved them and me a support call that day instead of just feeling like they were trying to persuade me to give up by throwing friction into the process of getting to someone who could actually waive my fee.

Re: Customers don't want chat bots

#135

Post by JohnFen »

ithkuil wrote: post #56
sgt101 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had the same, it refunded me, then 3 weeks later I got a notification from Amazon that they would be taking the money off me. I complained and was ignored. It was only $10 but it teaches a lesson.

I'm very surprised. My experience with Amazon refunds and in general customer support is that they care more about upsetting a customer than fighting for pesky 10 bucks. Could it be that their behaviour is different depending on who is the customer, i.e. what is the customers yearly spend? I shop frequently on Amazon. Last year I sent a gift to my nephew how was living in a dorm at the University. The gift was a como…

> I'm very surprised. My experience with Amazon refunds and in general customer support is that they care more about upsetting a customer than fighting for pesky 10 bucks.

I'm not surprised at all. There have only been two times when I needed to return an item I got from Amazon, and both times Amazon stiffed me. One of those items was for around $10.

Amazon seems to care about petty dollar amounts more than avoiding upset customers.

Re: Customers don't want chat bots

#136

Post by nkotov »

Chat bots and automated phone customer service suffer from the same problem - they don't solve the exact problem/questions I'm running into and it requires a real human to get me the answer I need.

Re: Customers don't want chat bots

#137

Post by scarface_74 »

ithkuil wrote: post #56
sgt101 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had the same, it refunded me, then 3 weeks later I got a notification from Amazon that they would be taking the money off me. I complained and was ignored. It was only $10 but it teaches a lesson.

I'm very surprised. My experience with Amazon refunds and in general customer support is that they care more about upsetting a customer than fighting for pesky 10 bucks. Could it be that their behaviour is different depending on who is the customer, i.e. what is the customers yearly spend? I shop frequently on Amazon. Last year I sent a gift to my nephew how was living in a dorm at the University. The gift was a como…

Two weeks before leaving home for six months, I bought two suitcases. They were delayed/lost and Amazon suggested I reorder.

I reordered and they still were going to be delayed until the day after we left.

I went to a local store and bought one.

I started a chat and told them that even if the suitcases did arrive that evening, I wouldn’t be able to send them back for a refund.

They said keep all of the suitcases and I would still get my refund.

They did come later that evening.

Re: Customers don't want chat bots

#138

Post by 3cats-in-a-coat »

seanhunter wrote: post #69

A big part of the problem isn’t actually chat bots even though it may well seem to be. It’s that you can’t pop some system atop a teetering ziggurat of shitty data from mutually incompatible systems and think the fundamental problems are going to just disappear. Example: I am currently executor of my dad’s estate and trying to get various policies and pensions and whatnot transferred into my mother’s name. One compan…

> It’s that you can’t pop some system atop a teetering ziggurat of shitty data from mutually incompatible systems and think the fundamental problems are going to just disappear.

I mean, works for CSS.

Re: Customers don't want chat bots

#139

Post by JohnFen »

blitzar wrote: post #9
AllegedAlec wrote: post #4

I have never met a chat bot that worked . I try the same question worded 6 different ways, I try asking it to connect me to an actual fucking human being. If it even does I still get stuck in a choice menu at first, which half of the time tells me that I can get help with this via their chat bots and disconnects. Fuck chat bots and the money-saving horse they rode in on.

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.

> 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.

Being that sort of customer certainly didn't get Amazon to treat me decently.

Re: Customers don't want chat bots

#140

Post by pessimizer »

JshWright wrote: post #99
mduggles wrote: post #32

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…

> The thing is nobody seems willing to let the system actually do anything except escalate to a person, so why bother? Because you are not the target user for the bot. For every user that proactively reads the FAQs, there's 10 more that don't and would happily open a support ticket to have someone copy/paste the FAQ answer to them. The bot is to there deflect those cases.

I don't think this is true, because if it were true, people would want chatbots. The last thing most people want to do is to call or open a chat with customer service, and they've usually looked through everything they can find to avoid it.

One of the reasons some chatbots, like at Amazon, could be useful is because their FAQs are impossible to find.

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