I've seen a live chat implementation that starts as a chat bot, but switches you to a person after a few clicks and you can't find what you need. I felt that was a perfect compromise.
A very annoying "feature" of some of those is making you wait for the human (okay that's acceptable) BUT timing out the session if you don't reply them within a minute or such.
That's the cousin of telephone hold music that interjects with a recording periodically, such as "We apologise for the delay; your call is important to us". All this does is repeatedly grab the caller's attention AND progressively reduce the strength of the grab, so that finally when a real live & hopefully useful human joins the call they may not be noticed. Just give me some crappy Muzak: instrumental without voice, or a gentle periodic beep to confirm the line hadn't dropped. If there is a voice then let it be only to tell me the remodeling queue length, e.g. "You are now eight callers from being served", and only do it upon change of status, not repeating every 30 secs.
> If there is a voice then let it be only to tell me the remodeling queue length, e.g. "You are now eight callers from being served", and only do it upon change of status, not repeating every 30 secs.
I have almost never encountered this while on hold (the closest I have come is the despicable "we are experiencing unusually long hold times", all the time), and it would be so good. What I particularly hate about the repeated announcements of the type you describe is that they are often much louder than the background music, so, not only do they train me not to pay attention, they force me to turn the volume way down, or hold the phone far from my ear, making it still harder to hear when a human comes on the line.
Revolut's in-app chat was like that. You may have to wait over 4 hours, so obviously you're not looking at the screen when a person picks it up. Then when you take a look you find they've replied and then left, and you have to wait for another person on a different shift to pick up your reply.
The trouble is, this was also their only support channel. No phone or web or email.
This went on for nearly 1 week when I was trying to talk to them to unblock my blocked-for-no-reason account a few years ago, and their response times got progressively slower.
In the end a quick message on social media got the account unblocked in 20 minutes. How?!
The chat boxes that actually are chat don't bother me. Provided they don't try to pop-up unrequested or otherwise make themselves annoying, I actually like them. They can be really handy for asking a quick pre-sale question or getting support.
The ones that are just a shitty interface to a FAQ suck, though. I don't even like it when they're as you describe, because its eventually turning into an actual chat with a real person is kinda-hidden functionality.
Exactly. When I know I can get a real live helpful person, it is awesome. When it is a bod that will just try to find information in the FAQ that I've already read, it is not very useful. When it is a live person who only knows how to give me the phone number and say, "please call during business hours" it is very annoying.
It ought to be possible to closely integrate a chat bot with a human so that people don't even notice the transition... It is always fair for a human to say "let me talk to my supervisor" and it is the same for a bot.
When I need live chat support, it's because I've already exhausted the help center and can't find my answer elsewhere. I really do need to speak with a human.
Fortunately, many chatbots in my experience will indeed switch over to human support if I write "I want to speak with a human". I'm glad they take that into account.
I'm glad you had that experience. In my experiences with both website based and call center based chat bots, the primary goal is to make it as difficult as possible to reach a real person, if I have a detailed question. I'll get a few menu options and maybe a link to an FAQ. I find it unbearable.
You, along with most people on this site, are not the average consumer for these type of chat apps though. People aren't exhausting the help center, reading FAQ's, searching other sites, they're probably barely even reading anything on a help center at all.
I approach it from the other direction nowadays. I'll hit up live chat instead of checking the help center. If they're going to annoy me with that on every page, I'm going to use it. And if it wastes their time on something trivial, that's on them.
Does that actually benefit you though? Is it more efficient for you to wade through a chatbot or wait for a human to respond rather than read the documentation?
This is the ideal scenario when building these out. Automate a lot of the low-hanging fruit that most people are going to be looking for, then seamlessly convert to a support chat with a human as needed
