> Significantly economically impactful in some cases- obvious examples of call centers and first-line customer support.
Is it that obvious?
Yesterday I had a trivial but uncommon issue with my pharmacy. I reached out to them online - their chatbot was the only channel available. I tried, over the course of 20 minutes and 3 restarted sessions, to communicate an issue that a human would have been able to respond to in 30 seconds. Eventually I just gave up and got the prescription filled elsewhere.
No doubt this pharmacy saved money by cutting support staff. I just think it's easy to see these solutions and cost savings without bothering to look at how much of a frustrating experience it can be for a customer.
I’d be surprised if something like a pharmacy managed to adopt a tech that quickly. In my experience non-tech industries often take quite a while to adopt.
I have seen plenty of chatbots used by my IT company and 3rd party suppliers I deal with. They really just turn what used to be phone tree to something text based. Pretty basic keyword search and recipes from my experience - that I usually like to escape to a human as soon as I can. I welcome a proper conversational AI chatbot that actually gets stuff done.
How are you gonna answer things like pricing? Issue with pharmacies is the super complicated and super secretive pricing structure. A good UI can solve this if they want to drop the secrecy.
I don't think so, I assume it's some more dated ML approach -- my point is moreso that it's not obvious that it's a good solution for this problem yet.
Is it that obvious?
Yesterday I had a trivial but uncommon issue with my pharmacy. I reached out to them online - their chatbot was the only channel available. I tried, over the course of 20 minutes and 3 restarted sessions, to communicate an issue that a human would have been able to respond to in 30 seconds. Eventually I just gave up and got the prescription filled elsewhere.
No doubt this pharmacy saved money by cutting support staff. I just think it's easy to see these solutions and cost savings without bothering to look at how much of a frustrating experience it can be for a customer.