It's usually far easier to build and test a UI than integrate the same backend code with multiple vendor's chatbot SDKs as well.

Is there any evidence customers prefer chatbots? The entire concept feels like it's driven by managers trying to impress their managers.

> The entire concept feels like it's driven by managers trying to impress their managers

It's cost cutting. Customer contact is always treated as a cost center.

Therefore, the only relevant question for its management is "How can we provide the minimum acceptable level of service, at the lowest possible cost?"

In general, the answer to "Why does X suck?" is to ask whether the company sees it as a profit or cost center. See: HR.

"Customer contact is always treated as a cost center."

"How can we provide the minimum acceptable level of service, at the lowest possible cost?"

Not with all products. Some companies understand, that good support keeps the people loyal to their products. But they are usually in a higher price segment.

The most surprising example I found was Dell Alienware support. Not sure if it's different from Dell consumer support, but I'd guess so.

Had to RMA an ultra widescreen monitor I use for work, and the experience was as smooth as silk and always in the hands of actual humans, who would follow up and push things forward.

Dell has always had good support, especially for business. I once bought a laptop second-hand that still had a few months of their highest support plan on it. Needed a screen first because of a few dead pixels. They had a tech come out to me at work and repair it on-site. A month before the warranty ended, the motherboard died. Same thing, replaced on-site. In both cases they offered to either send me the parts and DIY repair instructions or just send someone to do it. This was on a laptop I paid like $300 for (probably $2-3k new back then, it was a nice Latitude).

I’ve had their enterprise support on the phone with me for a dozen hours over the course of a week trying to get this SAN working. Their support remoted into it and had me manipulating physical stuff when required. They eventually got it going through a combination of hard resetting everything and updating firmware on half a dozen components + some software updates.

Dell doesn’t always have the greatest hardware, but their support really doesn’t rest until you’re satisfied. “No one ever got fired for buying Dell”.

Do they use chatbots for support?

Nobody wants chatbots and companies just drum up propaganda to create that impression because they want to reduce their customer support costs while giving themselves a pat on the back and pretending that it is in the interests of the customer.

A chatbot is just a long way of saying "GO AWAY!".

Large telecoms do this so they get to shut down their customer support almost entirely while claiming that they are available for the customers.

a large telecom in Australia has applied this to an extreme degree in the last two years to the point that you almost can't contact them no matter how severe the issue is. Their message is clear "SHUT UP AND PAY".

We had a somewhat beloved chatbot at work, but we are of course a consulting company.

And it is gone now and replaced with a much more effective app, my point is just that it clearly possible to make chatbots that aren't rage inducing.

The question is just if it is worth it, something we didn't think after the novelty wore off.

I believe one way it can provide value is when it is closely backed by competent support staff so it takes more of a receptionist role instead of the role of a support engineer.

> It's usually far easier to build and test a UI than integrate the same backend code with multiple vendor's chatbot SDKs as well.

I’m guessing that’s often not true if you’re running a Wordpress blog or some white label e-commerce platform or similar. You can probably just pase some JavaScript into an admin interface somewhere to add a third-party chatbot to your site.

I see this opinion come up on HN frequently. You are not the intended target for a chatbot. You're right; for most tech-savvy users, the ideal interaction would be through a well designed UI. However, there's a significant portion of society that is not familiar with UIs and just wants to "speak to a person" and describe the issue they're trying to deal with. Chatbots are the closest thing we have to an automated version of that.

My sister came for a visit 3 weeks ago, actually, no, 4 weeks ago, it was the week before Christmas. We were celebrating her 31st birthday and we went out to a great local restaurant. They serve vegan and vegetarian food and we had a great time. I went Christmas shopping and found a lot of great gifts for my son and husband. Yada yada. Now Christmas rolls around and my husband opens the present - it's a Polo Ralph Lauren shirt I knew he would love. To my surprise, and you won't believe this, I got him the wrong size! I need to exchange the shirt for the right size.

Hi I'm Macy, the Macy's chatbot. Thanks for reaching out! You need to exchange an item, is that correct?

I'm calling BS. People definitely communicate like this, but no one types this into a chat window

_You_ don't communicate like this, but the reviews & chat logs at my company are proof that people 100% do type like this. A lot of older people are really just looking for someone to talk to it seems, so yes, they will type out 90%+ fluff to just return an item.

Very true. Many older people I've met use Siri or Google as the primary means of device interaction.

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". :-)

You wouldn't believe some of the things people say to conversational interfaces.

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.

It's, of course, made up. But everyone can appreciate the anguish of having to talk to someone like this and trying to discern what it is they actually need. Macy, the Macy's chatbot? They can go through hundreds of terms that correlate with resolutions in milliseconds. if chatMessage.contains?(typoOrExactMatch('exchange')) then chatSession.initiateExchange() end

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.

Have you, or whoever recommends that, ever talked to an actual non tech-savy person? I don't mean it like a "me as a non tech-savy person" role-playing, but to a real flesh and bone grandma.

My mom tries painfully hard to make Bixby do things for her. She will spend 20 minutes trying to get it to find her a recipe or something instead of using an app. I keep trying to tell her to stop wasting her time and just use google but I guess there is still some novelty in these conversational interfaces (clearly its not easier or faster). If she could use google home to fill out her time sheet or save a document to google drive she would. The thing she finds difficult about tech stuff is remembering the workflow of how to accomplish a task through multiple websites/apps.

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.”

I remember reading an interview with Bill Gates about how "two way mirror" user testing where devs watch REAL users interact with their application is both incredibly important and humbling at the same time.

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.

Yes, I'm basing this on experience. A non-savvy user sees most modern UIs as overwhelming, difficult to navigate and they don't have the same priors that the average HN reader does. When they see a chat pop-up, they see a familiar interface (SMS has been around for long enough) and it gives everyone literate the ability to describe in plain language what problem they are having.

A/B test that: a well thought through UI vs a bot. I genuinely think it would be worse in time required for resolution, choice by the users. Obviously not one size fits all but in simple cases I doubt that even the non tech savvy user would prefer trying to articulate their issue in a way a bot could help them.

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.

Yes, good UI will cut down on 99% of customer interactions. We built a chatbot that companies can use by integrating with their e-commerce. The overwhelming majority of customers ask "where is my package?"

Why is that? Can't they just check the tracking number? That's a question I had until i tested a few dozen e-commerce solutions and most of them have buried their tracking number under several confusing menus. And even when you get the tracking number, carriers each have confusing ways to track packages.

Ironically I'm 18th in the queue at computershare.com right now (Its a way for even minors to do direct investment in a company other than more typical employee ownership programs or broker acct, very long story about a very old account).

The website has a bug where locked accounts are told to change their password, which will change their password via an email process but then your acct is still locked out of course, but you can click here to change your password. Endless loop. Very annoying.

The idiotic chatbot helpfully suggests the way to solve a locked account is to change your password. That's exactly where the bug is, and resetting your password does not unlock the acct which is the problem.

Helpfully the support website says if you wait a day a locked account will be unlocked. That of course is not true.

I've only been working on this since Sunday.

Anyway a fucked up company that is essentially inoperable, when given a chatbot, will merely have one more thing that doesn't work. Its a lot harder to code a chatbot that can fix a locked account than it is to code a website to unlock a locked account, so if they fail the simpler task you know the harder chatbot task would be impossible for them.

I'm hopeful that within a half hour I'll be able to chat with a human rep and gain access to my account. I've been in line for a human for about ten minutes and I'm down to 15th in the queue.

I used to work in telecommunications and I'm glad I don't have to hold a phone to my ear and listen to on-hold music for hours on end like the bad old days, I have multiple monitors and I can just leave this window up for however many hours it takes while working on other monitors.

Annoyingly some companies have started putting them in front of any customer support contact. It's incredibly frustrating. I'd much rather just a menu of options.

I just don't understand the problem they are trying to solve.

Because if you work in a call center/chat center 99% of your customers are asking the same 20-30 questions. You and I might be bright enough to read the Kb or search google but many people are not. A talented user support person is going to cost a company $40-60k/year and can only handle so many requests at a time.

I understand that, I'm just not sure why it has to be done with a chat bot. I've seen companies achieve the same by just having a simple option tree system before you get to the support agent (and divert you to self-service if possible).

I maintain a work intranet site. Its an out of the box Django site and I have very little time to design or develop pages. While I've not _yet_ implemented a chatbot, I really want to only for the purpose of translating whatever naive search terms into domain specific tags and terms. Even better if I could say, ME: Hey Bot! What's that thing I have to do at the end of every month that has to do with payroll? BOT: Payroll Accruals? click. haha.

I like chatbots when I need to contact the support of a company. The chatbot can do the normal support script, sometimes it works for me, and it makes the conversation much faster if I still need a human because they can read the discussion with the chatbot first and skip the basic questions.

I only use Chatbots to ask for a human because there's usually no other way to do it. They're like the new IE for me, only used to download other browsers.