Damn I hate the chatbots though.

Just yesterday I was on a site to get some routine lab test results. There is no link for results on the hamburger menu or the top of the home page. There are a few links for things further down, one of which is “Test Results”. But those all open the chat bot and ask it instead of just going to the page. However, it just offers some FAQs that I could find just as easily on the FAQ page. But it doesn’t even link to any pages no matter what options you select whole chatting. I finally gave up and clicked the “Dashboard” link in the hamburger menu which I had originally assumed meant the homepage hoping I just missed something.

Turns out the “dashboard” is a separate page, and I still don’t know if that’s where results go because it just asked me to verify my identity and despite completing the identity verification successfully (twice) it still keeps saying I’m not verified.

So yeah, I completed my visit to the site while having accessed the chat bot for help and not interacting with a human, so it “solved” the issue in the sense that I no longer had any desire to get any additional information from them and just waited for my doctor to send the results. I was also never presented with an option to contact a human, nor would I consider it worth waiting on hold to call a call center to find the core info that the site should he helping people get.

So, poor web design and broken services both made me use the chatbot unwillingly and made me leave the site without human interaction, so I bet they’d consider it a win for them.