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157

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

submitted 1 year ago by trashhalo@beehaw.org to c/technology@beehaw.org

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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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[–] Rentlar@beehaw.org 29 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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

[–] astronaut_sloth@mander.xyz 6 points 1 year ago

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.