The expectation for chatbots to completely solve and answer user questions and take over support is as flawed as the expectation that self-driving technologies in cars allow people to watch Youtube videos and not pay attention to the road or have a hand on the wheel.
The successful bots are ones that don't attempt to understand and respond to every single question perfectly, but instead act as a supplemental tool / guide and offering concrete decision points and actions for the user to take. For example, instead of asking "How can we reach you?" and letting the user enter free text and figuring out if the user entered a phone number or email or some random text that just short circuits the bot, show two buttons "Via email", "Via phone" and clicking each one would then ask for an email, or phone number.
The successful bots also know when to failover to a human being and failing over fast. I've hardly ever had a good experience dealing with sites that employ chat bots and it's not great to be frustrated by a bot when I'm already an angry customer who hasn't received my order.
The number of chatbot services popping up promising to solve customer support for businesses is concerning. I've personally had bad experiences with chat bots when trying to get a refund and all it did was point me to some help article that I've read, ask me a question that I've already answered before, or worst is provide an answer that is totally unrelated to the question I asked.
IMO, most chat bots out there are just digital reincarnations of phone VRU systems. I don't see them taking over customer support anytime soon. Bots should not be the front and center of customer support, but should be assistants on the sides of both customer and the support agent to provide sideline help while a conversation is ongoing, instead of the bot taking over the role of the support agent.
For example, when I start a conversation with a support agent, I could be prompted to enter my email address if I havent, or select a category (shipping, refunds, etc), all while waiting for the agent to get back to me, or as a starter to the conversation. On the agent side, a bot could be helping me by suggesting responses to the customer's question and letting the agent pick a response, instead of the bot answering the customer directly.
The human experience is crucial when dealing with a business. We're not there yet with AI to have bots take over the entire conversational experience between a customer and a business, so if you're building a chat bot, please don't bring the horrible phone VRU experience to the internet.
Don't get me wrong on bots though, they're awesome when it comes to certain situations and tasks that don't require human to human interaction and are usually structured, like shopping. Take Shopify's Facebook Messenger bot where a person could shop on a business's Facebook Page via their Messenger bot, with the bot taking on the role of navigating the catalog for the user.
The critical problem with chatbots is that companies don't trust them to do things. I generally am reaching out to support because I want something done, not because I want advice. This may not be true of everyone but for many, they have a real need. I need X price matched, I need to get my bill corrected, etc. Users know the chatbot won't do it.
I've never had a good outcome (a solved problem) with a chat bot. The best I've gotten is the bot throwing up its virtual arms and pointing me at an FAQ page or giving me a phone number to call. It just feels like a smokescreen to distract or frustrate me.
Chatbots, when done right, properly field answer your questions across a limited scope and domain, and allow for an easy exit to talk to a human. As a customer support platform with bots, my company helps businesses reduce their customer support load effectively using chatbots while making sure customers are able to talk to a person if they need to.
As a business, when you have customers asking the same question over and over (shipping questions, where is my order etc), it makes sense for a bot to handle that, and have your staff handle other more specific issues such as refunds, payment issues, or any other questions that the bot wasn't able to handle, or if the customer specifically hits the 'I want to talk to someone' button
My guess is the "bots" you've dealt with are dead-end bots that don't offer a way to speak to an actual person and are meant to make it as difficult as possible for you to actually reach someone. That's unfortunate - maybe it's a business decision (a poor one), or the chatbot just doesn't work very well and doesn't have a way to escalate.
Chatbots have gotten so much flak because a bunch of them try to use as much AI as possible to answer every possible question and businesses think chatbots makes needing an actual human support team unnecessary, which unfortunately is not the case.
Truthfully whenever I have been forced to interact with a chat bot designed by a business I have come to the conclusion that it is not there to help me, it is in fact there to frustrate me beyond belief and push me into giving up on seeking whatever help it is that I need. Chat bots while sometimes amusing often turn into a huge time sink as I try to interpret how it was programmed and how I can issue the correct commands to get me through to an actual person.
I feel disappointed when I read articles like this. It seems the whole production side of the market doesn't get yet what it's supposed to do. But it's so obvious.
If you chat with a bot you have near-human expectations. Yes it should be flexible and not just one-purpose. That's the reason for chatbots instead of a button. And if you can't provide that you need to use bots to make human labour cheaper, e.g. telephone bots who make support hotlines cheaper by getting some of the details out of the way before sending you to a human. Success will come to companies who can work in this gray area where bots and humans interact to provide a service together. I think Amazon did the same, when they started their suggestion engine, where actually humans would do the sorting at first, then supported by machine learning and finally they got replaced by pure software.
Yep chatbots sucks. The trick for good customer support is to enhance a human agent with AI and not trying to replace it. Suggesting answers to the agent and automatically replying when the confidence is very high.
Chatbots are great if they assist me with quick actions, like viewing my order/shipping status, and when it's obvious that I'm "talking" to a bot. What gets annoying are chatbots that start with "how can I help you?" and attempt to use natural language processing on my reply to guesstimate a response. More often than not I end up frustrated, wishing there was an 'Operator' button that I can use to talk with a real person. It's way easier and more comforting to be talking to a real person behind the business when I need something.
It's distressing that more and more chatbots are spawned every day to take the human element out of customer support or when engaging with a business. Chatbots work when they're a complement to human customer support, but when they're up front and center they tend to be distracting, frustrating, and their attempts to act human often amuses me. I do like Kik's and Messenger's approach to a bot and I think they are on the right path.
I've never had a good experience interacting with a chat bot. I find it insulting when a company I'm already giving money to insists I talk to a robot before I get to talk to a human being. Chat bots are just the latest version of listening to a dial in support phone menu and trying to figure out which option you need.
Never have I ever actually seen a chatbot that works well and is convenient to use. In best-case scenarios it's annoying until it hands the conversation over to a human, in the worst case it just goes around in circles and I leave the site. It's a classic case of choosing cost savings over your customer comfort. I'm not saying you're wrong, you're free to run your business however you like, but personally I will take my money elsewhere.
With all due respect, if I am interacting with your chatbot it's usually because your website provides zero ways to reach an actual human. I have lost count of the amount of times I had a specific problem not addressed in the FAQs, looked for a contact form for 10 minutes then reluctantly clicked on a chat button, only for the bot to continue to try to direct me to the answers I have already indicated did not help me. If I get lucky there's one option buried below a dozen other questions that lets me talk to a person (or, hell, even a sufficiently annealed language kernel) who can demonstrate a knowledge of the system outside of the two or three most likely footguns to avoid.
The problem (and I don't even know that the article adequately addresses it) is not that your bot is insufficiently good. It's that the bot is substituting for a support agent that wouldn't be sufficiently useful, because the support agent would also be made to operate according to a script, because the whole goddamn system is designed to make human interaction into an API. Because that's what businesses want. It's "scalable". And it only has the perverse incentive of making it hard enough to solve moderately complex problems that the user gives up.
On the contrary, I've had much better experiences with chat bots than I have had speaking with customer support on the phone. With a chat bot, I can wait for a response and be notified immediately. I wouldn't even mind if they took multiple hours to fulfill my request. Staying on hold on the phone for even 5 minutes feels like hell.
Chatbots are about as useful as phone trees. They can help solve the top 5 easy/common problems, but they are useless passed that. Anyone who has worked in a call center knows that more than half the calls are about the same couple of issues: reset password, finding common help docs, etc. Since help desks are cost centers, it makes sense to half a robot handle as many of these as possible.
I think most of the hate directed to chatbots are because they are really intrusive. You scroll through a page, and 15 seconds in your focus is disrupted as a fake chat window opens up. This is the digital equivalent to the annoying sales rep who asks you if you need help when you are clearly just browsing. The difference is a good sales rep has the intelligence to turn that conversation into a sale. A chatbot usually has to hand off the conversation to a real person to do this. So it has all of the annoyance without the benefit of a potential conversion.
Chat bots as frontends for help desks make sense, but they are poor sales people. If companies learned the difference, I bet their perceived usefulness would change.
Chatbots are really just a way to push and pull messages on messaging channels, nothing more, nothing less. How much automation you put behind it is really up to you. And yes, many early examples forgot about their users. Yes, it is cool to write a bot that can do something cool for a fraction of use cases, but as always, solving a real problem trumps being cool.
Now chatbots can be used as a content distribution channel (see publishers’ bots), app replacement (Swell is a great example, and they are in the next YC batch, congrats to them), but I’d like to point out how makers miss the point on arguably the largest use case for messaging in the business world today, customer service. Yes, most bots that address this domain can’t live up to the expectation either. And really, just think Job to be Done, the customer wants a quick, accurate and preferably personal reply to their question or issue, it is that simple.
So what we (Bicycle AI) did to make our clients better at this Job is we are fusing human and AI for a faster, affordable and scalable solution for SMEs. I hear you say, wait, isn’t this like Digital Genius, well, nope, we integrate with Intercom for example and we have a team of AI supervisors who approve the answers suggested by our AI.
This means our clients can provide blazing fast customer service for their customers 24/7 and according to their volumes. Simple as that. We use past conversation history and product docs to generate our suggested answers. We can go live pretty fast and can take care of around 60-70% of incoming conversations, escalating the complex cases after engagement.
Aaand, we are in alfa stage with emails.
So when it comes to harnessing automation in customer service, we believe that customers should not be the ones dealing with the rough edges.
Most chatbots are just bad: either just trying to get your mail-address because no support person is online or being a convoluted menu in the tiniest window.
It would be fair to rule those out and look at more conversational chatbots that provide good guidance through form filling, understand natural language and maybe are even hybrids that can be taken over by humans when they fail themselves.
A simple form of the hybrids is some pre-processing. The bot says "hello" and "whats your problem" or identifies your account and than human support staff jumps right in to the action.
The customers for chatbots were often support companies already doing web chat. They wanted a chat interface, as did their customers. The bots just didn't perform well enough.
I don't hate chatbots in principle. I mostly hate chatbots used as a customer support channel for SaaS applications - even more so when they are the only channel for customer support.
Why? Because frankly they just aren't good enough yet. In my experience they are too dumb to be useful and the process of interacting with the bot is just a waste of my time.
I also don't like when the chatbot interface pops up and starts interacting with me on an unsolicited basis. To me that's just like when I walk into a retail store and 3 seconds later somebody is in my face going "Can I help you find anything?" That is an experience that I also hate with a white-hot burning fury.
That said, I did have a good experience with an Amazon chatbot recently where I expected it to not work, and it wound up solving my problem after all. shrug
The successful bots are ones that don't attempt to understand and respond to every single question perfectly, but instead act as a supplemental tool / guide and offering concrete decision points and actions for the user to take. For example, instead of asking "How can we reach you?" and letting the user enter free text and figuring out if the user entered a phone number or email or some random text that just short circuits the bot, show two buttons "Via email", "Via phone" and clicking each one would then ask for an email, or phone number.
The successful bots also know when to failover to a human being and failing over fast. I've hardly ever had a good experience dealing with sites that employ chat bots and it's not great to be frustrated by a bot when I'm already an angry customer who hasn't received my order.
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