[smeej]

You've nailed it. I've been a customer support specialist in tech startups for the last many years, and the HUGE and overwhelming majority of questions are about things that have been covered in detail in the support documentation by any even half-competent team. People do not normally search for their own answers. More than 90% of tickets are well-answered (according to the user's satisfaction score!) by a pre-written response explaining how an article in the support center addresses their specific question, and then linking to it.

This is why large companies end up hiring thousands of low-wage workers who are prohibited by their software from sending anything but a pre-written response. The first-level agents can't even edit it. They can only send you something someone else wrote for the common situation.

Chat bots could easily replace these workers, and the customer experience would be better for it.

You will (probably) always still need the higher level agents who are really tech support, the ones who can identify when someone's report really is a bug and get it reported to engineers for fixing.

Those aren't the low-level agents in these outsourced call centers, though. Even if those people do recognize an issue, they can't do anything until they've sent you some number of generic responses that haven't satisfied you.

At least the bot could be trained to customize responses within a set of parameters and match the tone of the asker.

[nottorp]

But they're not replacing those agents with chatbots. They're replacing all agents with chatbots.