No it actually can be done competently, believe it or not. The best example of this I've seen is Swisscom. Swisscom has a customer support bot, they call it "Sam". Sam is amazing and a lesson to all other companies in how to automate customer support.
1. Sam tells you it's a bot. They don't hide what they're doing.
2. Sam is optional. You can choose to call human support at any time.
3. If you agree to always try chatting to Sam first they cut you in on the savings, and reduce your monthly bill. The reduction is big enough to be definitely worth it, it's not 10 cents a month or anything like that.
4. Sam escalates quickly and voluntarily if it can't work out how to answer your question. It doesn't try and block you from talking with a person.
5. Sam is astonishingly good at actually answering questions. I don't know what tech they're using for this; it seems like some sort of really souped up LLM with great RAG, maybe. Whatever it is, it works. Several times I've contacted Swisscom support and gone through Sam, and it did in fact solve my problem.
6. All the above is true even though I'm interacting with Sam in English, which is not a Swiss national language.
Truly, this is what a good bot-supported contact experience should be like. Of course in most cases institutions don't do such a good job, and just become frustrating. Bots that pretend to be human, bots that don't seem to know the answers to anything, bots that make it as hard as possible to escalate and of course in the end ... nothing in it for the customer to put up with that. But if Swisscom can do it then other companies can too, there's nothing magical about this use case.
My assumption is that after a while we're going to find that most people actually prefer bot driven support experiences, same as how they came to prefer self checkout at supermarkets, ATMs at banks etc.
1. Sam tells you it's a bot. They don't hide what they're doing.
2. Sam is optional. You can choose to call human support at any time.
3. If you agree to always try chatting to Sam first they cut you in on the savings, and reduce your monthly bill. The reduction is big enough to be definitely worth it, it's not 10 cents a month or anything like that.
4. Sam escalates quickly and voluntarily if it can't work out how to answer your question. It doesn't try and block you from talking with a person.
5. Sam is astonishingly good at actually answering questions. I don't know what tech they're using for this; it seems like some sort of really souped up LLM with great RAG, maybe. Whatever it is, it works. Several times I've contacted Swisscom support and gone through Sam, and it did in fact solve my problem.
6. All the above is true even though I'm interacting with Sam in English, which is not a Swiss national language.
Truly, this is what a good bot-supported contact experience should be like. Of course in most cases institutions don't do such a good job, and just become frustrating. Bots that pretend to be human, bots that don't seem to know the answers to anything, bots that make it as hard as possible to escalate and of course in the end ... nothing in it for the customer to put up with that. But if Swisscom can do it then other companies can too, there's nothing magical about this use case.
My assumption is that after a while we're going to find that most people actually prefer bot driven support experiences, same as how they came to prefer self checkout at supermarkets, ATMs at banks etc.