It's not like the previous tree based bots were good but at least they had a path to speaking with a person.
I suspect nobody ever tried to use the bot.
Most (Note: Not all!) questions you get when you work in a "customer service" role come from lazy, unobservant, or dumb people. So pre-AI, a large business needs an army of people to answer the phone and do things like walking confused people through, step-by-step, how to reset their password. "Did you check your email? Did you check the Spam folder? Did you give it 5-10 minutes?"
So AI is sold with the promise that you can just put it in front of your human agents, and then you'll only need 1/5 the staff (let's set aside the unfortunate economic implications for the other 80%) because most people's questions are stupid and trivial to solve.
Problem is, the dummies can't identify and divert themselves to the bot up front, so the person who loses most (other than the CS agents who lost their jobs) is people like you or me, who only contact customer service when we are reasonably sure there is no way to solve our own problem on the website/the app/by ourselves. We have to argue with a bot which is prompted "You're about to hear from a dummy whose main problem is most likely that he hasn't read any of our ZenDesk support articles, can't operate our website or a computer properly... and he probably has an IQ of 75. Send him answers from the FAQ -- repeatedly if needed -- and try to get him to go away. Don't give up, and don't escalate to an agent unless very specific criteria are met."
I do wish this were real: https://xkcd.com/806/
Actually, maybe it could become real if we benignly "poison" enough online sources so that LLMs actually do it...
Spectrum - we had a voice and a data cable modem (due to location and cabling requirements). Lost the phone service. Called in and the first things I offered them were the MAC addresses off both modems and which one was supposed to be which. That set off the "shit, he knows what he's doing" moment and we got both modems running correctly in less than ten minutes, including IVR and hold time.
Verizon - had a weird ticket that ended up being a NOC issue. Explained the odd backstory of events, a ticket that happened a couple days prior that I was part of a regional outage, and the Tier 1 guy had me hop on a video call to point my camera at my computer at the ONT where I basically did everything without him asking me to (cabling direct, pulling up IP status info, etc, live reboots) and he ran it by a NOC guy remotely and it ended up being a bigger ticket above me. Took an extra day of a regional outage, but that data helped them get rolling.