I had one good experience with a Chatbot recently when I needed Telco support by Deutsche Telekom. For some reason I lost my internet connection one day and when it came back up it was only half the bandwidth that DSL would sync up to usually. Also after rebooting my Edge Device.
The Bot offered to restart my DSL from their end and I assume the profile gets updated along the way there as well. So after a few minutes Internet was running at the desired speed again.
But I agree. Most of the Chatbots and Phone robots are useless to the point of directing you to the right department - asking for your authentication verification data for on-call support and then forwarding you to a Support Guy after 30 Minutes of waiting in the Queue. And even then in most cases you need to proof the same Auth data to the Support Guy again...
Charter Spectrum does similar if you play along with the IVR. First thing it offers is a whole-home reset signal which appears to clear stuck line cards and provisioning issues while all your stuff reboots.
It will end the call with you, and if the issue's not resolved, when you call back in it picks back up where you left off and immediately dumps you to a human. It also knows if there's a possible signal-related issue with your equipment based on things like CMTS alarms, and will also kick you right over to an agent to get it scheduled for a truck roll.
Oddly, the time I really needed the human (I had a cable modem for data and a cable modem elsewhere in my home wiring for the home phone system and the provisioning was screwed up and voice was nowhere at all) I was able to get them, explain the issue at hand, offer the data they needed, and got the call fixed and both modems reprovisioned and online correctly in a record 7 minutes.
The Bot offered to restart my DSL from their end and I assume the profile gets updated along the way there as well. So after a few minutes Internet was running at the desired speed again.
But I agree. Most of the Chatbots and Phone robots are useless to the point of directing you to the right department - asking for your authentication verification data for on-call support and then forwarding you to a Support Guy after 30 Minutes of waiting in the Queue. And even then in most cases you need to proof the same Auth data to the Support Guy again...