| Chatbots suck for customer service. I've never had one be able to actually do what I want as they only answer questions. I think a better format is to have proper documentation that's searchable. Whenever I talk to a customer service rep it's because the docs are non-existent or incomplete or I need someone from the company to do something. Neither of these are a good use case for a chatbot. I've been tangentially involved in chatbot projects from within companies and they were an abject failure. To have a proper AI chatbot that can give back informative actual proper answers and take actions will cost more than hiring customer service reps. Some Examples: * If you have a transaction on your bank account that's been declined. A chatbot will just tell you the same thing the website does which is that there are various reasons. I want to know what was the reason my specific transaction on my specific account was declined. That means the chatbot has to have up to date real-time access to that detail of my account which is were they all stop working. * What about if one of my instances on a small VPS provider has stopped responding and won't reboot? I want the chatbot to have hypervisor access and restart from there... * What if my internet has stopped working and I can only phone someone... Chatbots don't really work here so sacking the entire CS department means I can't get these things sorted which will mean I will stop using/paying for the service. I'd like to see if after sacking almost all the CS staff what happens to their retention rates for customers I suspect it'll drop badly. Maybe though this is just replacing the outsourced agent who is similarly clueless. |
Chatbots with ai will not be the same.