TBH, 99% of the clients never read the documentation, the faq, nor they search in google. Lazy users are wasting time and if a chatbot can filter a significant percent of them, then it would be a net gain for humanity. chatbots are not a silver bullet, but they can kill lots of unnecessary noise. all that we need is something that can answer basic questions asked by average users in a specific domain.
You say lazy users but if I have to google something that is the business who is at fault. Example: A business like Shopify has a large community, FAQ, half a dozen different documentation sites for everything, multiple blogs, and probably other things out there, but I still have to google to find the right place and right answer. This is on a platform I've used for 13 years but I either forget something or they add something new, or they've changed an API, etc.
So you know what the fastest way is sometimes? Shooting off a support ticket so I don't have to be the one spending my time searching for the answer.
I don't know if there's a perfect solution to all of that but IMO there's certainly an issue if I have to google for information for the business site that I'm on. Chatbot, universal search, better UX, a source of truth, something... What I do know is 20 different subdomains with 20 different UXs and 20 different searches isn't good for the business or the user.
Bad for you and Shopify, but some organizations have a single place of documentation and users still fail to bother checking it. If something is not immediately obvious for them on the ui, they automatically want a phone call with tech support. add to it a small company with a small team of support staff and it turns into an unfair battle. so, every mechanism to resolve the user's issue before you need to involve a human is a tool to make everyone happy and maximally productive.
Usually I just know which issues will be or not be in company documentation. I’ve never been wrong before, since every single time I reached out to support they needed to take action that could not be competed by a customer alone. One example is how poorly many SaaS handle conversion from single to team accounts. Usually they end up having to create an entirely different account and make admin changes so I can reuse the email.
> some organizations have a single place of documentation and users still fail to bother checking it
It depends on the size is the org in question, but at some point docs existing and being indexed is still not enough to find them. On the extreme side of that, AWS has docs for pretty much everything - yet I often fail to find the right page, simply because there's too much content and there's lots of pages talking about related things but not answering my question.
Sometimes it's missing docs, sometimes it's lack of searching, sometimes the most viable path to the answer is through support. (Amazon has TAMs for that purpose)
> add to it a small company with a small team of support staff and it turns into an unfair battle
Totally agree and I feel for any any support staff, small or large, as it is unfair. I guess my point is insanely large, highly profitable organizations probably have a UX problem along with a much larger greed problem. No one should be stuck chatbotting or having non-existent support if they are a paying customer with Google.
The world is not big organizations only and ai chatbots are not substitute for proper tech support. Chatbots are the self help lane enabling the tech support to concentrate on the tickets about real issues.
