My state has used a chatbot for car registration renewals for years. It works just fine, I can't truly complain, but it's literally just a higher friction way to fill in a short form. Why did it need to be a chatbot?
Yikes! We are headed towards customer service hell. At least I'd like there to be some human feelings while I'm getting fucked.
And it's not supposed to solve your problems. Solving your problems costs investors money. It's supposed to make you go away.
Recently I wanted to file a chargeback for something that was not delivered. The "dispute this transaction" chatbot told me this scenario (actual dispute) is not in the call tree - contact customer support, because it only knows all the different ways your dispute might not be a real dispute so they don't have to process it (e.g. kids used the credit card). The customer support chatbot told me to go to the transaction page and click on "dispute this transaction". The only way to actually file it was to find the magic incantation to talk to a human. And no, "talk to human" doesn't work. It just gives you a blurb about using the chatbot more effectively.
Sorry, this is entirely incorrect, for many reasons, not the least of which concerns your universality in extrapolating your experiences to everyone else: "they never will," well, "never" is a long time; "universally useless," obviously not universally useless, if at least some people find use from them; "An LLM chatbot is just a call tree that says sorry to you if you swear at it," incorrect entirely, which belies your misunderstanding of what LLMs actually do and behave like.
I recently had to have an Amazon order refunded, and it happened entirely though a chatbot multiple choice tree, and it wasn't even an LLM, just a dialogue tree. It worked fine, I got the amounts refunded as intended. Now, with LLMs, they are even more useful than what I experienced, as they actually understand your intent as well as a human would. If you disagree with that fundamental premise, then I'm not sure what to tell you other than to use GPT-4 via ChatGPT.
In short, just because you had bad experiences doesn't mean everyone else has as well.
My current employer has a slack helpbot where you dm the bot and it does a first pass at trying to find the right ticket/form etc to solve your problem. If it can't, it opens a regular helpdesk ticket with the info you have given it so far and the helpdesk sorts your problem out. It's great.
Most corporate chatbots however are not like this. For example, when I went recently to resolve a problem with an insurance policy I got pushed on the website to the chatbot. After going through a bit of annoying to-ing and fro-ing the chatbot told me it couldn't do anything and I had to call up. At this point all the information I had given it while it was trying to resolve my problem is in the dumpster and as far as its concerned, job done. I however have wasted a bunch of time and am back to square 1. Worse than that, when I sit in the (now incredibly long) phone queue to speak to the few human helpdesk agents who remain I have to listen to the recording repeatedly telling me "why not use our super-helpful chatbot".
No, it's also about data entry. It would be a terrible waste for a human to be sitting there going: "No, that account ID isn't right either, please check again."
A few chatbot can actually do stuff and then it’s fine.