<rant>
I had an issue with mail delivery yesterday which needed human intervention. So I opened the website of the national postal service, navigated to the contact page and tried to find a telephone number to call the customer service.
Nothing there, they removed the telephone number from all pages and instead had installed a chatbot. The company logo had one eye added to look like a Minion. I soon realized that the logo was the most intelligent part of the chatbot. The logic behind it had just a fixed set of questions which included basic lines like "What is your name" and "What is your address". The chatbot obviously didn't understand my multiple requests for a telephone number for human intervention and just restarted the questionnaire a few times, without referring me to a more intelligent creature.
After five frustrating minutes trying to poke holes in the conversation, I closed the tab, opened Google search and found in a few seconds with a simple query the customer support phone number.
I must say the chatbot had one positive side effect. Probably many people gut stuck in the endless loop because there was no phone queue when I called the customer service. An agent--with real human brains this time--was able to solve my problem in a few minutes.
Pheww, what are those chatbot programmers thinking? It seemed they had just translated a web form questionnaire into a chatbot script
</rant>
