Not had too many episodes of chat or text assist, but mostly it's been very helpful and has solved or fixed any problem I had. Sooo much negativity these days. Now everyone's an idiot? I understand what you're saying but maybe I've not encountered what you're talking about. Hmmmm....
Of course they're not all bad. I shouldn't have said "everywhere." Not true. But it does seem to be happening a lot.
My worst chat experiences lately have been with my website's host. I was happy with them until they were bought by another company a year or so ago.
First, as Rich says, there are new barriers. A big, blue chat button used to be at the bottom right of the editing screen, and it was there all the time, always visible. Click and chat. Gotta love it. Now you have to (a) hunt for the page with the link and (b) talk the bots into connecting you to a live person.
. . . where you encounter the new breed of chatters. The last time I got through, it was to ask them how to add a new email address to my domain — something they helped me with a few years ago. Yes, I should have written down the steps back then and filed it somewhere, but I didn't, sue me. This time, I learned that "we've never done that." Just not true. They did it. Result: no new email address. (And, of course, I'm paying more than I did before the company got bought.)
A few weeks before that, I was having trouble uploading some music files a friend gave me. The files didn't upload properly, so I I wanted to know which file formats were acceptable for music uploads. The answer: only MP3. I replied that I have over 150 songs on the site, most are AIFF, some are WAV, none none none are MP3. The "customer satisfaction advocate" told me I didn't know what I was talking about, they're all MP3. Why would I lie? Why would I not know my file formats? Why can't he tell the difference between an MP3 and an AIFF? I finally uploading some new editing software (which I was going to do anyway), converting the files to WAV, and uploading them. They run fine.
It's not just chat lines. My wife's latest customer service run-in was by phone. We have a joint bank account. The bank uses an outside vendor to manage its automatic checking. For no good reason, the vendor recently rerouted one of our monthly utility bills to the wrong company. So one of our utilities got paid twice and another didn't get paid at all. The (new) person at the bank told my wife that (a) that the account wasn't joint so my wife couldn't request service (yes, I checked with the bank myself to make sure it's joint), (b) that my wife must have ordered the reroute herself (she didn't), and (c) that the bank can't call the outside vendor to straighten out a mistake
my wife had made. (Of course, my wife doesn't do the routing. The vendor does.)
In the past, the bank had always jumped to fix problems — even problems they had no responsibility for, like the time a gas station wrongly charged my debit card. This time, the bank fought my wife every inch of the way.
Our brave new world.