That’s a great article, Tony.

I would say that smaller wins await us just around the corner. It would be great to have a sensible, sophisticated digital assistant (i.e…

That’s a great article, Tony. It underlines really well the agony we’re all faced with when pushed into the self-serve position.

I would say that smaller wins await us just around the corner. It would be great to have a sensible, sophisticated digital assistant (i.e. a bot) who could perform some high quality work for us. However, such bots are hard to find (and will be hard to find for a while). So instead of sitting around and agonizing and waiting for some future day when high quality bots become available, we should look to ‘hire’ some simple, single-minded bots that can alleviate the pain of doing unnecessary legwork.

For example, it’s much easier to say (or type) “@internet_service_bot, my internet connection is down”, than it is to call 1–800 number and be put on hold (and forced to listen to the muzak hell) for 30–40 minutes, while being bombarded with recorded messages like “don’t hang up, your call is important to us, a service representative will be with you shortly…” With a customer support bot, the message gets delivered immediately and the support bot will start cracking on it right away. Bots are scaleable, human call centre isn’t.

Of course, the support bot is not sophisticated and cannot fix the internet connectivity for us, but it can tell us whether it’s a know issue or not, and if it is, it can tell us when is the ETA on the fix. That way, a bot can save us dozens of minutes and let us move on with the day.

More sophisticated bots are coming, that’s for sure, but they’re still in early infancy. I don’t think we need to wait for them in order to abandon self-serve purgatory and enjoy some much needed straightforward and helpful services.