Right. You contact a human because you want a guarded administrative action to be taken.

For all the impressiveness of these chat bots, I think people are still skeptical and hesitant to give it levers that are actually connected to things.

It's hard to hold a computer program accountable in any nuanced way when it starts misbehaving other than kicking it to the curb

> For all the impressiveness of these chat bots, I think people are still skeptical and hesitant to give it levers that are actually connected to things.

They don't want a person to escalate you either, but you can pressure a person in ways that a chatbot cannot be pressured. At least a person (and their employer) wants to get you off the phone; the person because they're sick of being yelled at and coming up with reasons not to escalate, and their employer because they're paying for the time spent.

A chatbot is happy to talk you in circles all day, and costs near nothing. Empowering chatbots is not the point, one of the advantages of chatbots is that they can be disempowered more easily than humans.

“At least a person (and their employer) wants to get you off the phone; the person because they're sick of being yelled at and coming up with reasons not to escalate, and their employer because they're paying for the time spent.”

Click. Disconnect. Easy. They just disconnect the call when a customer is frustrating them and oftentimes disconnects happen when first reaching a person after sitting on hold for a long time. The other tactic is to transfer the customer around the call center into oblivion.

For your average customer support case, there is nobody to hold accountable either when they screw up and cost you time or money. It's just another faceless agent of the company.

So I work in customer service for tech company, I see the tickets and about 60% of them can be solved with a chatbot. Most of the time the instructions were already written on the customers screen and they just didn't bother to read them.

I agree, calling up and getting a bot is irritating, but personally fielding every call without screening out the silly PEBCAC tickets gets expensive quick and hold-times pay the price.

> and they just didn't bother to read them

I would encourage you to reconsider this sentiment, and to read "The Design of Everyday Things".

Sometimes you really do have a situation where the user needs to read and they just don't. But that's less common than them "not reading" because:

* The relevant information is buried in what appears to be bumph that we all sensibly skip over.

* The instructions are actually not clear.

* The user reasonably didn't expect that instructions would even be required so they didn't look for them.

* There was a more obvious action to take on the page than reading text, e.g. "Continue".

Those people making tickets can read. The fact that they aren't suggests there's something wrong with the instructions or how you are presenting them - or more likely, the fact that they exist at all.

If you have any specific examples I'd be interested.

One example is when a user tries to upload a file to the system that is not allowed (permitted files are plainly listed), a large red error message appears that says "This file type is not allowed. Please upload one of the following:"

You would not believe the amount of tickets we get daily where people are confused as to why their file wasn't uploaded.

Automated bots clear a lot of this stuff up.

I think the issue there is that you're assuming all users are familiar with what "file types" are. It could also be that the format they are uploading is entirely reasonable so it should work. A better solution is surely to convert the file for them. That's what you're making them do themselves right?

I've ran into a similar situation lots of times when uploading photos on mobile. Often you get "this file is too large". Well no shit, we have the technology to automatically resize it now! It's not difficult! (Also have you noticed how Android lacks that basic functionality?)

Yes it is more work than not doing it, but it's definitely less work than implementing an AI chat bot.

In my experience, customer service are not that much more helpful than a chatbot (heavily undertrained or no privileges to do anything at all).

They’re untrained and untrusted by their employer, which means they can’t have privileges to do anything helpful. It’s super common and I don’t even understand why they have support at that point.

Sorry, who do you deal with these days who has a customer service line? The few that do, you have to go through like 3 minutes of robot "press 3 for this department," with the 0 shortcut to talk to somebody leading to an instant hangup ("goodbye") except on menu 27B where it works

I think that every business I deal with has a customer service line or a physical place I can go to and speak to a human. I try my best to avoid businesses that don't.

> Typically I call customer service because I'm trying to tackle a problem that cannot be solved by using their normal interface. There is usually some subtlety or exception that requires an agent capable of understanding them at the other end, otherwise I wouldn't have bothered calling.

I never get anyone that understands the basics let alone the subtlety. Do you have some secret method to get people that are knowledgeable?

I find that calling support is worse than doing nothing in a lot of cases. They simply waste time that you could be spending finding a workaround or migrating. Migrating is becoming a problem though because everything is consolidated into a few shitty companies with terrible support (ex: Microsoft).