Chat Bots

Has anyone ever used a chat bot and been happy with the interaction? Every time I encounter one online it just really annoys me. Perhaps I'm just not the target market, but usually whenever I actually try chatting to someone on a website (or call their phone for that matter) I have exhausted all ways of accessing the information and I need a human to perform some action for me and the chat bot is literally just in the way.

Part of me thinks perhaps some people can't search the web and need a chat bot but another part of me thinks that it's just a (futile) attempt by companies to reduce the cost of supporting their products.

My own experience trialing website chat also backs this up. We tried chat to see if customers would be more likely to convert after chatting with us. Nobody wanted to chat with us and the only customers we spoke to were existing customers who previously would have emailed us to achieve what they wanted to achieve. My learning from that is that people would just rather do the thing online without ever interacting with a human.

So are chat bots just another way to extract money from large corporations at their (and our) expense or is there actual value in them ?