Far from being ‘intelligent’, today’s chatbots guide users through simple linear flows, and our user research shows that they have a hard time whenever users deviate from such flows.
Some of our users were worried about sharing personal data such as birthday, address, credit-card numbers, and social-security numbers with interaction chatbots. They were not sure whether this data would stay private or would be shared with the platform in which the chatbot was built. In particular, in the case of Facebook Messenger, people seemed keenly aware of recent data breaches: “I am a little worried about putting my information in Facebook Messenger […] I would be hesitant to enter credit-card information; it would be nice to be able to enter it elsewhere.”
Companies are better off investing their money in the existing, well-established channels: improving the UX of your website or app will bring you higher return on investment than creating a chatbot that will get little use. We saw that even good chatbots (which are likely to require increased development and testing costs) have little chance of being discovered and considered useful.
→ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/chatbots/
I absolutely hate chatbots! So much that I added a rule to Quiet to hide/block chatbots from websites.