The author argues that customers do not actually want chat bots for customer service, contrary to what companies claim. Chat bots can only handle simple, routine queries, but for complicated issues customers want to speak to a human representative. Companies are pushing chat bots to reduce costs and increase profits, without considering the negative impact on customer experience. The author only sees chat bots as useful for customers when used to cancel subscriptions that require contacting customer service, showing how frustrating the current system is. The author believes we should build technology that customers actually want and would appreciate, rather than focusing on bad experiences or defending against them.
I think there are ways they could be used. If they’re intelligently used as a filter to resolve basic issues that don’t require human intervention and immediately transfer to a human when the query doesn’t fit into a bucket extremely cleanly, they could be an efficient force maximizer, and you could theoretically even have specialists in different areas of your service that the bot attempts to direct most relevant queries to.
But the companies using them don’t want great, efficient service. They want cheap service at all costs to anything else. So that’s what you get.