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.
The current state of chatbots is embarrasingly bad. I still haven't seen a chatbot use-case that can't be solved better with an FAQ section + documentation search and a human as second line of support.
There’s a special little place in hell for whoever decided the whole world needed chat bots for every crappy website.
Why would I want to try to articulate something that could be found in a simple tree? Just give me direct access.
I don’t know where to find it: search!
The issue is not covered in the standard workflow? Get me a real person!
Did anyone implementing ever end-to-end test this for speed and user friendliness? Did they just misinterpret wanting to talk to someone? I want to talk to someone because the process doesn’t cover my case, not because I actually want to have a conversation with the broken process.
Typically chatbots that I interact with are just attempting to steer me back towards FAQs. I don’t need a different interface to search your documentation in an attempt to keep me on the cheap customer service path and away from the expensive customer service path.
Which isn’t to say they can’t be helpful. I’d much rather chat with a bot than call a person, if the bot is capable of doing the things I need. The thing is nobody seems willing to let the system actually do anything except escalate to a person, so why bother?
Whatever your use case, a chatbot is not the answer. Please reconsider what you are doing and make an FAQ for easy questions then pay for real support for interactions that need it. Chatbots solve nothing, and are about as hostile as you can get toward your users. If you're trying to build a system that closes the blinds or plays music on command, fine. But any kind of pawning of actual support on a chatbot is basically just saying fuck you to your customers.
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.
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.
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.
> When you go to the chat-based support interface on a website, it's usually because you've read the entire contents of the website and didn't find what you are looking for.
Because chatbots were so far utterly useless.
It doesn't seem crazy to think that given a good enough chatbot, users might prefer to ask their question directly rather than have to find the specific piece of information they need from a dense docs website.
Wherever I encounter a chatbot, my user experience usually suffers a lot, especially if they give me a slow and hard to navigate tree menu instead of a well structured help index, and no way to contact actual support.
Yeah. The sad thing is, I've never used a single chatbot that was actually helpful. I naturally don't go looking for conversations with chatbots, but recently more and more companies decided to shut down their email address. So the only way to resolve an issue is by wither talking to a chatbot and then a person (hopefully), or by phoning them (and I'd rather not).
Some chatbots even refuse to let me talk to a person at all due to a bug (the dutch water utility service). Another asks you to write a message to the human representative and then discards it due to a bug (bol.com).
Yeah, chatbot can only be as good as the content that is in the website. If the chatbot didn't answer it properly, that's because I did not have content on the website to answer this question.
My biggest issue is that so many chatbots are utter trash, that when I come across one that is actually good and can solve my problem quicker than a human that I've already lost patience and don't want to engage with it.
If chatbots really were good, and could solve my CS problems 90%+ of the time then I'd love them. But that doesn't happen, so I want to speak to a human please.
I find these chatbots absolutely useless when I need support for something. They don't seem to do anything besides read off solutions to common problems (i.e. "turn it off and turn it back on again").
If I'm going to the trouble to call or email support, I have a question that I couldn't answer with a simple search or with a help article. Wasting my time with frustrating chatbot doesn't get me any closer to a solution.
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'd be more impressed if the site had a chatbot to talk to. The actual site [1] is just one of those pages that wants your email.
This seems to be a generic problem with chatbot companies. I have yet to find one with a bot intelligent enough to answer basic questions about the chatbot product. Most chatbots are about as smart as "press 1 to pay bill, press 2 to return product..." with a weak natural language system on top. A basic web site is more useful.
Personally, I hate talking to random humans (I have friends, if I want to talk to someone). The only reason I ever do so, in the case bots are intended to serve, is if the company's website can't do what I want. Give me a good website that provides all of the stuff I might need to do when interacting with your company, and I will never ever ask to speak to a human.
I've always felt like bots for use in customer service were trying to solve a problem by adding more problems. So, now, not only is someone talking at your company because they have a problem that couldn't easily be solved by your web presence, now you're making them navigate an uncanny valley of dumb questions and answers...following the same old support script only now with even less intelligence and autonomy on the part of the company rep.
I'm glad you had that experience. In my experiences with both website based and call center based chat bots, the primary goal is to make it as difficult as possible to reach a real person, if I have a detailed question. I'll get a few menu options and maybe a link to an FAQ. I find it unbearable.
The thing about that line of argument is that the balance between things being sorted by the bot vs needing a human is almost never right.
My current employer has a slack helpbot where you dm the bot and it does a first pass at trying to find the right ticket/form etc to solve your problem. If it can't, it opens a regular helpdesk ticket with the info you have given it so far and the helpdesk sorts your problem out. It's great.
Most corporate chatbots however are not like this. For example, when I went recently to resolve a problem with an insurance policy I got pushed on the website to the chatbot. After going through a bit of annoying to-ing and fro-ing the chatbot told me it couldn't do anything and I had to call up. At this point all the information I had given it while it was trying to resolve my problem is in the dumpster and as far as its concerned, job done. I however have wasted a bunch of time and am back to square 1. Worse than that, when I sit in the (now incredibly long) phone queue to speak to the few human helpdesk agents who remain I have to listen to the recording repeatedly telling me "why not use our super-helpful chatbot".
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.
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