I find them deeply upsetting, not one step above the phone robot on Vodafone support: "press 1 for internet problems" ... "press 2 to be transferred to a human representative". Only problem is going through like 7 steps until I can reach that human, then waiting some 30 minutes until the line is free.
But it's the only approach that gets anything done. Talking to a human.
Robots a a cruel joke on customers.
Every time I joined a new company, I dreamed that they would have a robot trained with data from their 15 documentation sites, 3 ticketing systems, and some emails and chat history. I will happily ask all kinds of stupid questions all day long and if gets back to me with a minute with 70% correctness.
In a lot of conversations with human customer service representatives, I found that they were no more than a search engine backed by their internal documentations. Sometimes I could feel that they indeed knew the actual answer to my question, but they were not allow to say it out and ended up embarrassingly repeated some scripted sentences. Both parties felt terrible.