Posted December 10, 2020
Back in 2016, Gartner predicted that by 2020 people would be having more conversations with bots than with their spouses (yikes!). Whether that’s come to pass or not, the fact is that we are engaging with conversational artificial intelligence (AI) on a daily basis with our virtual assistants like Google, Siri, and Alexa. We ask them questions and give them instructions in our home or office, from our car, and in the middle of crowded stores. We also engage with businesses’ chatbots to get help, whether directly on their website or in a message on their Facebook page after hours. They ask us if we need help at just the right moment, and we know that little chat box at the right hand bottom of the screen is almost always there if we need help.
And why shouldn’t it be? We live in a time when consumers demand answers instantly. If they don’t get them, they go somewhere else. At the same time, younger generations are moving away from traditional phone and email support and favoring brands that offer support via live chat. So it’s no surprise that businesses are installing chatbots on their websites left and right.
The question is, is it helping – or frustrating – their customers?
Conversational AI is the term for any artificial intelligence technology that can have human-like conversations with…humans. It uses machine learning (ML), natural language processing (NLP), natural language understanding (NLU), and natural language generation (NLG) to “speak” to humans in a (hopefully) intelligent way. Chatbots are a form of conversational AI, but the technology can be applied to text, email, social, and even voice.
Like all technology, there’s a wide range of quality and capabilities with chatbots, as well as with the programmer installing them, and the marketing and customer service people anticipating the queries needed to configure them. A lot can go right, and a lot can go wrong, when using chatbots.
While the term “chat” implies a casual conversation, the reality is that chatbots work best when they’re used to perform routine tasks and answer common questions.
A good chatbot is a:
Like any new technology you’re implementing on your website or marketing strategy you’re deploying, chatbots require forethought and planning to be successful. As mentioned earlier, chatbot technology varies, and they have to be properly configured in order to work for your specific business.
Some of the most common problems with chatbots include:
The best way to avoid these problems is to acknowledge that chatbots are a tool. They should act as an extension of your customer service department, not a replacement. They should be used to automate very specific and recurring routine tasks, answer questions, and solve known problems that you can accurately anticipate. When chatbots do their job successfully, customer satisfaction, conversions, and sales can skyrocket. When chatbots go bad, customers are sad.
Interested in more bot talk? We love talking tech! Contact PixelPeople to learn more about our web design and development services and see if a chatbot is right for your site.
Tags: ecommerce, ecommerce web development, web design, web development
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