has paypal been taken over by AI?

Long story short, I fat fingered something and needed help recovering.

Surf the online help but no help. Hit the chat button, got a bot. A dumb one maybe. Steps ya through the common questions but if ya respond "none of the above", it has no idea what to do. Didn't see an option to xfer to a live body that didn't know what to do. So I tried a good old fashion phone call and hey look, a 6 digit code. Maybe they'll recognize me. Got the same dumb bot that still doesn't know what to do with a question it can't answer. Ok fine, lets try resolution center. Similar menu but when ya get to "none of the above" it comes back with a form to fill out. Cool, making some progress. Fill it out, hit submit, get an error message with no explanation. Try it a few more times changing some key words, same result.

Great. I'll just pick one of the menu items and explain myself in the notes. That at least worked and created a case. Why do I think the same Artificial Stupidity behind the web chat and the auto attendant is also behind the resolution interface?? Rhetorical question because I've set up those systems in a previous life. My next expectation is a canned answer to an entirely different question because previous life.

I have recently made a few calls to PayPal using the phone line. When it asks for the 6 digit prompt I state I have none.

Then it will go into another menu and I just say "agent" or "representative" and eventually I cam connected with a live person.

For me it ignored agent but responded to representative. Didn't expect it to understand "live body" but tried that too. Did you get a rep in india ?

Should be all fixed and was just having a rant while listening to MOH. Ya can call me Doc but only this one time.

On a side note, if an auto attendant ever says something like "queue times are really long, would you like us to call you back?" Take em up on it because it actually works.

The rep I spoke with was out of the Omaha, NE location (I actually asked just out of curiosity). No accent that I could discern.

1st one sounded indian. When she got done telling me what the bot already told me, I escalated to 2nd level and she also sounded indian. Last I knew most companies were migrating back to contact centers in your home country. They both spoke english and the 2nd one fixed my screw up so they could be on mars for all I care.

Doc out.

What really pisses me off are the products that use other users to answer the questions. So what you end up is much like Moparts - someone asking a question and getting replies from people telling what worked for them. Paypal is one of those products !!

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Quickbooks/Intuit does this. What's worse, if you use their "Chat" for help, you have a human helping, but they're helping 4-6 people at a time, so you may get a question that you immediately answer and have to wait for 10 minutes until they get back around to you and ask another question. I've started calling at 6:00 am Eastern so the call volume is low...