> The touchscreen in front of my android greeter allowed me to check in with a cellphone number, but my jet-lagged brain forgot to start with the country code. The computer didn’t recognize my number. The robot, now impassive, was no help.
This is the kind of stuff that makes robot/computer customer service bad. If you fall into the normal use case, it's fine, but if you need anything unusual or you make a mistake, the escape hatch is always to get a real human, so you've now wasted time.
On top of that, it's often much slower than human service. Lots of fast food restaurants have a ordering touchscreen kiosks now, there are some advantages, but ultimately it's a much slower experience because the interface is much less efficient than talking to a human who's using a dedicated piece of hardware that they're trained on.
This is the kind of stuff that makes robot/computer customer service bad. If you fall into the normal use case, it's fine, but if you need anything unusual or you make a mistake, the escape hatch is always to get a real human, so you've now wasted time.
On top of that, it's often much slower than human service. Lots of fast food restaurants have a ordering touchscreen kiosks now, there are some advantages, but ultimately it's a much slower experience because the interface is much less efficient than talking to a human who's using a dedicated piece of hardware that they're trained on.