That's the thing.

At work, I hated an hr bot for years. But in the last year it became good and useful and I now like it.

If a bot gives me what I need I'll like it. If it only provides value for YOU though and makes MY life more difficult then I will not enjoy it very much.

Big problem with most bots is they don't have authority and they refuse to turn you over to someone who does. If I'm engaging with your customer service, it means I have an issue I need resolved. The worst bits are the equivalent of incessantly yet cheerfully asking me to restart my computer in an endless loop with no path out.

You should try talking to people who work in customer service call centers, most of their calls are arrogant opportunists that aren't calling to fix any issues... but to get something extra.

"This item is scratched, so I want a 50% discount refunded" - comes to my mind. Most of customer service is dealing with Karens

If you wouldn't buy a scratched item in store, why should you have to accept it from an online retailer?

I wouldn't call a person wanting their new item to be in new condition a scammer.

I think the idea is that the item isn't scratched. They're just claiming it is to try and get a refund/credit.

Oh that's fair enough. Both sides suck! I never worked in call centre, but I worked 6 months in Future Shop as a teenager (it was a Canadian version of Best Buy in the 90s), and there's a reason why I stopped as soon as I could - both the sellers and the buyers had higher percentage of dishonest bums than I was comfortable with.

The story that made me quit:

We had an extremely clear policy of no returns or exchange on opened printer cartridges.

A customer came in to obtain a refund. He claimed it was the wrong cartridge.

Did anybody help him or instruct him to take that cartridge? Nope.

Did he notice that it's explicitly not for his printer? Before he opened it? Nope.

I pick up the cartridge and... it's empty. Dry. Nothing left in it.

Before I could even say anything he looks at me, and start yelling and slamming his hands on the counter and making a scene. Not because he was upset, there was nothing to be upset about yet. It was just a rational, calculated move to obtain a refund on a cartridge he fully used. 30 seconds later the store manager comes over and gives him the refund.

Store manager coached me and indicated, this is basically retail life and where he comes in to provides judgment - the disruption and bad image this person created FAR outweighed the $50 he gave away. It was nothing personal and I should not feel bad or betrayed that I was overruled after following clear rules.

I absolutely 100% agree with manager's perspective. He did the right thing. I could not blame him or wish that he did otherwise. The only way I could find for that scenario to have a different outcome was for me to not be there anymore, so I tendered my resignation the next day.

You can provide that with a simple HTML form though.

That honestly never crossed my mind, but I think your right. Anything a chat bot could do or approve could simply be accomplished by an HTML form or some type of self service.

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.

Many of them are forms in disguise. I furiously hate Virgin Media's "chatbot", because every conversation with it is "what's your name? Postcode? Account number? Select from these 3 options". This is just a contact form with a slower UI.

If you issue everyone a refund, you won't be very successful in business. I think a GPT-powered chatbot (not an old-school one) could screen between:

- Genuine issues

- Scammers

Probably more effectively than a minimum-wage apathetic human being.

Isn't that the point of "This could be a form". The chatbot would have certain rules that it would need to follow and I don't see why those rules couldn't be translated into a form.

I wouldn't underestimate the mental capacity of scammers, it would only be a matter of time before they would know exactly how to prompt the bot to issue a refund.

That's orthogonal to whether you use a simple form or not. Filtering out false leads is a hard problem though.

For super simple stuff, sure, but many issues are easier to explain in natural language and a fluent UI (something with a lot of conditionals, well beyond a simple HTML form.

Yes, - but there are no bragging rights, promotions, or other rewards for the team/manager who put clear, useful HTML forms into production.

Depends on the management above them. (And maybe depends on the spin: "We introduced a clear HTML form that reduced customer loathing by 30%...")

Point. (And LOL on your "loathing" quip!)

NC DMV replaced all of their HTML forms with chatbots and it drives me nuts because I used to be able to pay my taxes and fees in under a minute, but now I have a stupid chat bot interaction that takes closer to 5, because you can no longer just complete the form and submit it but have to answer queries from the bot one at a time with some BS fake typing delay.

Yes. This article is criticizing the primitive chat bots deployed by companies today, not good ones that ought to be possible with the latest and upcoming LLMs.