I'd have a problem with both in the support case. The alternative to a human contact is a natural language interface that just wastes my time and/or laziness in other parts of the business. If my problem is covered by your FAQ, improve search. If my problem can be solved by a bot, let me do it in your UI. If handling my problem through a human requires more information prepend a form. Provide a clear path to skip/escalate.
To be fair though, I'm annoyed by human first level support for similar reasons most of the time but at least escalation/problem solving with them is easier than a bot that explodes when you go off-script. I think, personally, that making me talk to your fancy answering machine is just devalueing. If a company wants my business they should have human support and pay them enough to work with the customer.
> If my problem is covered by your FAQ, improve search. If my problem can be solved by a bot, let me do it in your UI.
This assumes that people who have a question they need answering will consider searching for an answer or getting to grips with the UI first, rather than heading straight to ask customer support. That's often not the case. Long before support chatbots became widespread, telephone trees made a point of telling every single user in the queue the help section of their website existed...
Agree bots should often make it easier to escalate and should default to escalation rather than blowing up[1], but if a large proportion of your queries are actually answered by telling people the FAQ page is a thing, it's a bit difficult to justify paying humans to do it.
[1]if escalation takes a couple of minutes for a response escalation and blowing up might be indistinguishable...
Yeah, I can totally agree with that under the constraints you mention. I might conflate my annoyed experience with marketing type bots with the actual requirements for a support one, there's certainly dark patterns with how bots are implemented and integrated these days but if they become more wide-spread I guess we'll figure out how to tackle those as well.
To be fair though, I'm annoyed by human first level support for similar reasons most of the time but at least escalation/problem solving with them is easier than a bot that explodes when you go off-script. I think, personally, that making me talk to your fancy answering machine is just devalueing. If a company wants my business they should have human support and pay them enough to work with the customer.