Blog ▷ Bot vs. bot. Waiting for a human.

Bot vs. bot. Waiting for a human.

Blog  — Wed 29 Jul 2026

One of the most remarkable things, in my opinion, is the way organizations misuse bots.

The idea was simple: a website receives many visitors, and you want to help all of them. Some of those visitors have questions. And, in turn, a large portion of them are actually asking exactly the same question as everyone else.

You could of course write an FAQ for that. It stands for Frequently Asked Questions. So, a list of frequently asked questions. But somewhere along the way, it became fashionable to build a little robot into every website instead.

That can save an enormous amount of time for visitors with questions, and it also saves a great deal of time for the customer service department that would otherwise have to handle them. Nowadays we call that a webcare team. At least when it comes to questions asked through digital channels, such as website chat, social media, apps, and so on.

Where it all went wrong

But somewhere along the way, especially large organizations seem to have decided to rename that department to "web-don't-care." Fewer and fewer people serving more and more customers, or so it seems. A shame.

Even worse is when a company gives you no other way to contact them than through the bot. A bot that is not only unhelpful, but also incapable of connecting you to an actual employee. Sometimes for as long as 6 to 8 hours. I won't mention the name of this large Dutch organization, but it was quite an experience. That's for sure.

So I found myself thinking: right... so I'm being brushed off by a bot? And every 3 minutes the bot asks me to reply, otherwise it will disconnect the chat? It also asks whether I've already found the answer myself while waiting, and whether I still need assistance. In other words, whether I'd please just go away. It almost feels like a deliberate tactic. And not a very decent one.

Fighting fire with fire

So I decided to write a bot for the bot while I was still waiting in the queue. It only takes 8 lines of code. Let me show you.

  • Right-click on your Windows desktop and choose: New > Text Document.
  • Give the file a name, for example: my-bot.ps1.
  • The .ps1 extension belongs to Windows PowerShell. That is what will run your bot.
  • Open the file in a text editor and paste the following code into it:

$wsh = New-Object -ComObject WScript.Shell
Start-Sleep -seconds 10

while (1) {
    $wsh.SendKeys("I'm still here, and I'd like to speak to a customer service representative. Thank you.")
    $wsh.SendKeys("{ENTER}")
    Start-Sleep -seconds 60
}

These lines of code give you 10 seconds to switch to the chat window; I'll come back to that in a moment. After that, the script will type and send your message every 60 seconds.

  • Save the file. Then create a shortcut to it on your desktop.
  • Right-click the shortcut and choose Properties.
  • Replace everything in the Target field with this command:
    C:\Windows\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\powershell.exe -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File "C:\Users\YOUR-ACCOUNT\Desktop\my-bot.ps1".
  • Of course, replace YOUR-ACCOUNT with the name of your own Windows account.
  • Click OK.

That's all there is to it. You've created your own "bot." It's really more of a script, but let's not argue over semantics. The goal is what matters, and from here on it's simple:

  • Open the website with the chat, and therefore the bot, that you want your own bot to respond to.
  • Switch to your desktop and double-click the shortcut we just created.
  • You now have 10 seconds to switch back to the chat window and place the cursor in the message input field.
  • Your bot will now type and send your message to their bot every 60 seconds.
  • Then go do something more productive with your time. Half a day later, or longer, just check whether an actual employee has finally replied.

Simple bots

It has become a strange world. Human contact seems to be getting rarer and rarer. And unfortunately, most bots still aren't intelligent enough to be genuinely helpful. Even though that is entirely possible if you really want it to be. So we're trapped in a world of mediocre customer service. Or, well... no customer service at all. In that case, I suppose it's just a simple bot versus another simple bot. We have to do something.

Needless to say, this article is written with a wink. Use scripts like this responsibly. The goal is not to overload systems, but simply to prevent a chat session from being closed unnecessarily while you're waiting for a human customer service representative.