So many places now have automated chatbots, and many insist that you go through them first. I generally don’t want much interaction with most of the places I buy from or deal with. I’m a pretty technical person; if a feature exists, I can find it and figure it out myself. I certainly don’t want to talk to a stupid chatbot first.
I’ve seen places that require you to interact with a chatbot before processing a return (how is that easier than pressing a button?), or a large Swiss bank that requires you to first convince their chatbot before you get to talk to a human (love it when financial institutions use AI technology that’s very good at guessing the right answer).
But I recently had a case that tops all of these.
An accident on a rental bike
Someone I know had an accident on a rental bike from Publibike. The accident happened because the bike wasn’t braking properly, something dangerous enough by itself1. I went to help them, and after taking care of them and making sure they were okay, I wanted to ensure no one else could rent the bike since it was clearly too dangerous to ride (and illegal too).
So I went to their website and called the hotline. I navigated through the three-layer-deep phone tree and finally selected “other issue.” I was then informed that I should use the chatbot through the app, and I was hung up on. This was for a case where I wanted to report a bike that was clearly too dangerous to ride, while I was sitting next to someone who had just been injured using that very bike.
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Text message I received after the automatic system hung up on me (left), and the chatbot that was linked (right)
But perhaps more shocking was that I received the text message, clicked on the link, only to be informed that this chatbot doesn’t work anymore. I have seldom seen such big negligence. Having one of your many bikes not maintained to the point where brakes fail is already not great (bordering on negligence), but then not having a functioning way to report this to a human who can block the bike from the system quickly and efficiently is beyond negligence. It’s an example of optimizing for profits at the expense of people’s health and safety.
Chatbot companies
Of course, you normally don’t know beforehand if companies employ these stupid chatbots, and sometimes you don’t really have a choice. But for me, I have the following policy: if I see one of those chatbots as a replacement for proper customer support and I have the ability to change to a different company2, I will do so. When one of my banks introduced the chatbot system with the automatic chatbot, I switched banks.
Many times companies like banks or insurance providers don’t realize that they probably offer very similar services at comparable price points. If I get to choose one that doesn’t have a stupid chatbot and can help me quickly and efficiently, that’s worth a few Swiss francs, and that’s a change I’ll make every time.