Last month, I had a problem with a popular mobile banking app in Southeast Asia. Nothing exotic. A transaction didn't go through, and my support ticket had been sitting untouched for two weeks.
So I opened the app's chatbot. It greeted me warmly, asked how it could help, and then couldn't do a single useful thing. It couldn't look up my transaction. It couldn't check the status of my ticket. It couldn't tell me why my issue was unresolved. It could answer FAQ questions, and that was it.
I called the hotline instead. Spent an hour navigating prompts, got bounced between menus, and every path ended the same way: "Please contact our chatbot or check your existing ticket." The system was built for deflection, not resolution. The ticket that nobody had touched for fourteen days.
I gave up. And somewhere in that company's dashboard, my interaction counted as a successful AI chatbot deflection.
The uncomfortable part: if you shipped a deflection-optimized bot this quarter, a customer somewhere is living this exact loop right now. Your dashboard is calling it a win.
