Hi I'm Macy, the Macy's chatbot. Thanks for reaching out! You need to exchange an item, is that correct?
Like the grandparent explains, some people just need a way to explain what they need in their own words and I don't think chatbots completely fail at that. The best one's I've experienced have prescreened me for common issues and then sent me off to a live person as soon as it was clear my request was not easily addressed with the built in script.
For example, my mom has used an iPad daily for many years now. She's never used a laptop or desktop. Rather, she navigates and interacts with an iPad exclusively using Siri and Google voice search--rarely, if ever, touching the keyboard. And she's a (relatively) advanced user.
Granted, to tech savvy users, these interactions are often quite funny. For example, opening the YouTube app, and then doing a voice search for "YouTube videos for how to make chocolate icing YouTube please". :-)
A long time ago – I'm talking early 2000s – I designed a voice UI for a train timetable information system. It was a phone line, you called it up, told it where you were travelling to and from, and it gave you the information you needed.
After launch, I would listen to the odd call at random to see how it was handling things. I distinctly remember one case where, when asked their destination, the user said "I'm going to a funeral".
Now, when somebody said something outside the scope of the expected responses, we would reprompt them up to twice more with a bit of extra guidance. I'm proud to say that, even though this caller started way off course, the system steered them back and they ended up going away with the information they needed.
That's actually a danger of making your conversational interfaces too human-like - people then talk to them like they're humans, and it doesn't go well. You're better to make things a little stiff and robotic, so as to manage their expectations and make them understand that they need to constrain their answers a bit to get what they need. It might feel less natural, but everybody goes home happier at the end of the day.
Also while I’m on my soap box this is a PSA to all ui devs, stop trying to turn every menu/button text into an icon. My mom does not even remember that the button with 3 horizontal lines means menu she is not going to understand that stamp icon means “add a signature.”
The above quote is from the days where people bought shrink wrapped software so it was incredibly hard to observe people using your application in the wild. Therefore, companies spent money to do it in house to get better data.
Modern web applications, I would argue, make observing user behaviour in real time trivially easy but I'm sure lots of companies don't even bother. In turn, this brings us to the incredibly complicated interfaces we have today.
Recently came across a delivery service which sent an sms announcing a delivery to connect me to a Facebook messenger bot to ask me the order number to give me the delivery information. How is this process better? Just send a link to the tracker and have all the necessary info in one place. Add a button to reach someone if you must.