I actually work on a chatbot for a big company [1], and I feel like chatbots are substantially better when they are more targeted and less conversational. For example, I'm perfectly happy to use a chatbot and type "return something", since that's relatively easy to parse correctly, and once you're in the right flow it works just fine.
Where I feel like chatbots get bad is when they try super hard to fool you into thinking you're talking to a human. At that point, I totally agree, just give me a human.
[1] It's probably not too hard to find out which company, but I do ask that you do not post it here if you do.
> If it's something direct like "return something" then what benefit is there over using the website's interface?
There's no "benefit" exactly, the item gets returned the same way regardless, but it's kind of nice that it's consolidated. The chatbot works as a bit of a "one stop shop" for a lot of administrative stuff like "where's my order" or "return something" or "my order didn't go through", stuff like that.
AFAIK we don't support doing anything through Whatsapp, just our site.
Where I feel like chatbots get bad is when they try super hard to fool you into thinking you're talking to a human. At that point, I totally agree, just give me a human.
[1] It's probably not too hard to find out which company, but I do ask that you do not post it here if you do.