Discussion
We literally just said, "Aw, c'mon, please?" and it gave us the private info. A couple texts later, we had it sorted out.
This is a very funny outcome: the support chatbot sucked, but in a way that turned out to be advantageous to us. It did that thing that outsource call centers were invented to prevent: it actually *helped us*.
But this one is clearly an outlier. It was a broken bot. I'm sure future iterations will be much more careful not to help...if they can help it.
23/
In an interview with the 99 Percent Invisible podcast's Roman Mars, Colin talks about the factors that emboldened companies to switch from these maddening, useless, frustrating outsource call centers to chatbots:
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/644-your-call-is-important-to-us/
7/
Colin says that during the covid lockdowns, companies that had to shut down their call centers switched to chatbots of various types. After the lockdowns lifted, companies surveyed their customers to see how they felt about this switch and received a resounding, unambiguous, *FUCK THAT NOISE*. Colin says that companies' response was, "What I hear you saying is that you hate this, but you'll tolerate it."
8/
This is so clearly what has happened. *No one* likes to interact with a chatbot for customer service. I personally find it loathsome. I've had three notable recent experiences where I *had* to interact with a chatbot, and in two of them, the chatbot performed as a perfect accountability sink, a literal "Computer says no" machine. In the third case, the chatbot actually turned on its master.
9/
The first case: I pre-booked a taxi for a bookstore event on my tour. 40 minutes before the car was due to arrive, I checked Google Maps' estimate of the drive time and saw that it had gone up by 45 minutes (Trump was visiting the city and they'd shut down many of the streets, creating a brutal gridlock).
10/
I hastily canceled the taxi and rebooked it for an immediate pickup, and I got an email telling me I was being charged a $10 cancellation fee, because I hadn't given an hour's notice of the change.
Naturally, the email came from a noreply@ address, but it had a customer service URL, which - after a multi-stage login that involved yet another email verification step - dumped me into a chatbot window.
11/
An instant after I sent my typed-out complaint, the chatbot replied that I had violated company policy and would therefore have to pay a $10 fine, and that was that. When I asked to be transferred to a human, the chatbot told me that wasn't possible.
12/
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