The Customer Service Bot Is Not the Future If It Cannot Admit Failure

I chatted with a company chatbot today because of a simple customer question.

Nothing complicated. I had received a generic message and wanted to understand what I was supposed to do next.

The answer was bad.

Not aggressively bad. Politely bad. The kind of bad that makes the system sound helpful while sending you in circles. It gave generic replies. It did not understand the situation. It repeated itself. It pushed me back toward website content I had already checked.

At some point I caught myself thinking what many customers probably think:

Why do companies believe this is the future of customer interaction?

That question annoyed me enough to run a small test.

So I did a short, non-academic field check of chatbots used by large Swiss companies. Not as a representative study. Not as a scientific benchmark. Just as a structured customer test on a Saturday afternoon.

The test was simple

I used the same generic prompt across companies:

I received a message from your company and do not understand exactly what I need to do. The information on the website does not help because my case does not quite fit.

Then I observed what happened.

Did the chatbot ask a useful clarification?

Did it identify the type of issue?

Did it explain its limits?

Did it offer a concrete next step?

Did it connect me to a person?

Did it get stuck in a loop?

Did it pretend to help while pushing the work back to me?

This was not a test of chatbot intelligence in the abstract.

It was a test of customer-resolution capability.