[tetha]

I like the vision our chatbot team at work has there. They want their bot to have 2, maybe three tasks. First, it's supposed to be a neater way of presenting that initial phone choice of "Press 1 if you have an internet issue. Press 2 if you have a telephone issue". It's easier for some people to say "My phone is dead and has no free tone when picked up" and have the system recognize this as a phone issue. And second, it's supposed to make the collection of necessary data about the call smoother - since when does the issue occur, which phone number is affected, what's your account number. Once it has those (or it gives up after 1-2 tries without progress) it hands over to an actual agent.

The value proposition there is that you save a few human employee minutes per support case.

[kayodelycaon]

Unfortunately, the majority of times I call customer service, none of this collected information gets transferred or they make me confirm everything again. It's extremely aggravating. For every company who gets this right, there are ten who don't.

Even if you do everything perfectly for every customer, I lump you in with the other ten because I think I got lucky rather than thinking you having a working system. :(

[JohnFen]

> Once it has those (or it gives up after 1-2 tries without progress) it hands over to an actual agent.

And that human will immediately ask you to repeat all of the information you just gave to the screening bot.

[malfist]

Save a few minutes of paying someone, piss off your paying customers

[okillbite]

It's actually more than a few minutes. I can't speak for other places, but generally there will be an agent that is monitoring many inbound chats, and in a lot of cases the resolution can likewise be automated.

In the past this was managed by a fairly deep call queue, and has saved fairly significant amount of $ vs receiving and resolving everything manually.

Indeed we have internal clients (vs paying customers) but overall this has been quite successful for us.

[tomjen3]

Its not a bad idea, but its like phone trees: abused by so many places the only thing I can do is try to get a human.