alt Hacker NewsI do not know how much I might be an outlier, because when I reach out to technical support the problems are rather difficult, because if they were easy I would solve them myself, without needing the official technical support.
In any case, during perhaps hundreds of interactions with chatbots accumulated during many years, I have never encountered even one when the chatbots were useful, but they were always just difficult to pass obstacles in the way of reaching a human who could actually solve the problem.
To be honest, even in the case when some services still had humans answering the calls, those were never more helpful than the chatbots, but at least when speaking with humans it was much easier to convince them to transfer the call to a competent person, which with chatbots may be completely impossible.
The vast majority of tech support is "Level 1," which are easily solvable problems that can be handled by a flowchart (or more recently, by an LLM). Things like "I want to return this item," or "I want to cancel service," or "I want to use a different credit card."
These things generally have self-service options, but many many people are uncomfortable with them and would rather have an agent solve it for them.
Consider that a lot of users nowadays only have a cell phone, no PC. It seems like an edge case consideration but it's really not.