Customers don't want chat bots
creativegood.com
Customers don't want chat bots
1–10 of 473 posts
Re: Customers don't want chat bots
#2Today I needed to contact a government service office for a task that only a human could perform. Now unfortunately, the phone tree of this office is broad and deep, you need to authenticate with about 4 data points before continuing, and if you hit the wrong option after authenticating, they will hang up on you without a second thought.
So I authenticated got through to the correct option on the first try, and it seemed like they were going to drop me into a queue to wait for a live operator. And then a recording informed me that "due to a high call volume, nobody is available to take your call." and dropped the call! Can you believe that. No option to leave a callback number or wait 4 hours in a queue, just terminate the connection. I called back and got the same thing.
The website does have a chatbot, but of course it is not capable of connecting to a human being and only capable of relaying the simple FAQs they've programmed into it.
I am pleased and impressed, for the most part, with the proliferation of Live Agent Chat for many services. I really prefer this over a telephone interaction (most of the time.) So it's good when I can easily break past the "virtual assistant" trying to FAQ me and get to a human.
But in this case, today, I suppose there were no humans to be found. Tragic. They have good compensation packages there.
Re: Customers don't want chat bots
#3~"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 from exploring this new area? Experimentation is critical to understanding what will work and to the development of our society.
Re: Customers don't want chat bots
#4I 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.
Re: Customers don't want chat bots
#5Even the Amazon chatbot is fairly useless, and like many chatbots it is slow too, seemingly to mimic a human typing speed which is really annoying when it's not even pretending to be human.
Re: Customers don't want chat bots
#6I 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.
They combine the charm and brevity of telephone voice recognition with the text parsing power of a knock-off early 90s adventure game.
Re: Customers don't want chat bots
#7As a customer you want someone to resolve your issue, which is mostly a matter of someone being responsible to file a ticket and ensure it gets solved.
A chatbot has no responsibility, it is just a useless parrot of the documentation. It doesn't serve any useful purpose except worsening the experience for the customer.
Re: Customers don't want chat bots
#8~"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…
Most importantly, the chatbot cannot actually solve anything, it is not plugged into any functionality.
Re: Customers don't want chat bots
#9I 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.
Re: Customers don't want chat bots
#10I believe this is a clear example of the Moloch effect [1].
Companies race towards having the shiniest chatbot or _virtual assistant_, without fully understanding all the implications and customer needs. Everyone wants to have their brand name associated with being "the first" or "the best" in their segment for providing such technology, no matter how trivial it may seem -- e.g. as the article points out: just wrapping already available info in a dialogue.
Given these incentives and high stakes, it's also hard to "exit" the bandwagon, due to various factors like reputation, costs, and the uncertainty around your competitor not doing the same.
[1]: https://danielmiessler.com/p/moloch-the-most-dangerous-idea