> but customers can get those answers already from the app or website. We’d need to have access to the specific company’s call categorization to know this. Jus

> but customers can get those answers already from the app or website. We’d need to have access to the specific company’s call categorization to know this. Just last week I was chatting with someone in their mid-thirties who was telling me how they don’t have an ATM card or access their bank through the app or website. Everything is done in person at a physical branch. They need money? They go to the teller. And I know many older people who are the same way. This is why many companies already have automated phone systems that walk customers through the easy to solve problems with mostly rote formulas. Add in a chatbot that can be better at handling slight exceptions and now the company can solve customer issues without having to pay a human to do the interaction. From my time answering phones for an internal IT department for a large-ish company, it’s clear that some people called just to interact with and talk with a human. Even if they could have solved their problem through an app before a human answered the phone. > Instead, the reason people go to customer service is because of a question that’s so specific, or complicated, or gnarly in some respect, that there’s no way the app will have the answer: you need a human I’d suspect most of these aren’t all that specific or gnarly, but just that it can’t be done through the customer facing app, yet. When switching from physical SIM to eSIM, Verizon’s website kept erroring and directing me to call. I looked online and many posts said it was quickly solved with a call. I called and they fixed it quickly. That could almost certainly have been handled in an automated way, just not yet. I don’t think they even asked any questions, other than confirmation style ones, which a chatbot could have done. I needed to waste time calling and waiting in a queue to talk to a human. The company needed to pay someone to be waiting to answer that call and spend a few minutes with me. Seems like a great spot for a chatbot. My expectation from my limited experiences is that the number of calls that a sufficiently large business receives are not the specific or gnarly cases. I’d love to see real data.