As a business, when you have customers asking the same question over and over (shipping questions, where is my order etc), it makes sense for a bot to handle that, and have your staff handle other more specific issues such as refunds, payment issues, or any other questions that the bot wasn't able to handle, or if the customer specifically hits the 'I want to talk to someone' button
My guess is the "bots" you've dealt with are dead-end bots that don't offer a way to speak to an actual person and are meant to make it as difficult as possible for you to actually reach someone. That's unfortunate - maybe it's a business decision (a poor one), or the chatbot just doesn't work very well and doesn't have a way to escalate.
Chatbots have gotten so much flak because a bunch of them try to use as much AI as possible to answer every possible question and businesses think chatbots makes needing an actual human support team unnecessary, which unfortunately is not the case.
And agree with you, being on development of a chat solution over the last two years I've realize that the AI sucks big time for chatbots no matter how hard we try they will never have the human touch. that's why I have avoided the NLP integration as much as I can. This lack of human touch is the reality of any chatbot that does NLP, sentiments analisis, etc.. they simply fail. I have tried xatkit and I could not establish a proper dialog either.
In that sense I've implemented in chaskiq some sort of path selector / decisional steps that you can compose for further routing assignment to human agents, and that works very well.
Also, for small companies, it may be the only option as they cannot be available 24/7.
Have plenty of experience helping companies set up chat bots properly, and watching customers actually talk to bots and have their questions answered by bots. There are always some people that would automatically escalate to human support every time and not bother with the bot, but there's also a fairly large percentage of people who would go through with the bot.
Can we also dispense with the second-hand reassurances that "someone" would disagree, and replace it with first-hand testimony from someone who actually prefers the chat bot to chatting with a person?
Effective chatbots tend to triage requests and point users to further information, rather than fully solving the issue on their own.
In my experience, most tech-savvy people do not want to call or chat. They only resort to those options when they can't find a way to do what they need to on a company's website. There is another group that wants to talk to a real person regardless, but they usually prefer to call. I'm not aware of any group that wants, or has their needs best met, by talking to a chat-bot.