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Creative Good: Why customers don’t want chat bots (creativegood.com)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

A few of the chatbots I worked on, back when I did that, were actually good. Those companies had actually looked at their support traffic and figured out that like 95% of it was people asking the same 20 or so questions that had specific answers. Or at least that you could get to a specific answer with 1-2 followup questions. Like, a huge number of people just want to know how to pay their bill, and the answer is "go to this webpage or call this number".

It's kind of a waste of human time and effort to have a human answering all those questions, so the chatbot dealt with those (and tbh it was 50-50 whether those people even knew they were talking to a robot) and the actual hard shit got a warm transfer to a human agent who got the chat transcript.

Honestly the companies it worked best for, either their online documentation was a total shitshow so the chatbot was your best hope of actually finding anything, or a huge proportion of their customer base were total luddites who just didn't want to use a website and wanted to talk to someone. (We had to make our chatbots support Internet Explorer 11. In 2021. Because for some of our clients IE11 was like 30% of their traffic. I don't even fucking know.)