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Comment by mgaunard | Hacker News Reader

As a customer you want someone to resolve your issue, which is mostly a matter of someone being responsible to file a ticket and ensure it gets solved.

A chatbot has no responsibility, it is just a useless parrot of the documentation. It doesn't serve any useful purpose except worsening the experience for the customer.

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The worst are the bots that can't figure out what you're trying to ask about and _refuse_ to turn over to a human because you the end user clearly aren't in what they are good at.

Had this experience with Vodaphone when I tried to set up my account and add my fucking phone number so I had insight in my bills. Didn't work. Got directed to a bot, which continually misunderstood me and no amount of prompting from me made them direct me to a human person.

The WORST is when calling a specific department you in the generic queue and the bot wants a piece of information that you don't have (eg. demanding an ATM card number when you only have an investment account) and hangs up when you don't give to them.

The thing is, I wouldn't be asking for support if I was able to find a fix for my issue in the first place. ChatBots are unable to fix the initial problem because the system used to fix said issue doesn't already exist in the account tools. Human intervention is required to fix the problem, so therefore chatbots are completely useless in this context.

> The thing is, I wouldn't be asking for support if I was able to find a fix for my issue in the first place.

You are the exception though, the vast majority of people don't do that. Those are the users the chatbot is designed to help (because they represent a large portion of a typical support team's interactions).

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