A bot is AI-powered software that is designed to perform a certain set of tasks on its own without any assistance of a human user. While it may sound fascinating to you, there are high chances that you have already come across this kind of technology in the recent past. You’ll be surprised to know that the chat agent “Mike,” who helped you place an order through Pizza Hut’s Facebook messenger chat, is no human. It’s all done by the chatbots.
Major online brands like Lyft, Fandango, Spotify, Sephora, Mastercard and, of course, Pizza Hut use chatbots to offer seamless support to their customers. If you want to take your business to the next level, you can also consider using chatbots for business. However, these chatbots come with their own baggage of pros and cons. And before you decide to adopt this technology for your business, you need to be aware of those areas in detail.
The advantages of chatbot usage
1. Faster solutions
There’s no denying that the bots can deliver faster solutions than humans in several areas. Unlike humans, chatbots have zero waiting time. So, if a customer places a query or a request, he/she does not have to wait for hours to get a response from the other end. This feature can be very useful for academic study help providers who receive urgent requests from students on a regular basis.
Moreover, chatbots can perform round-the-clock assistance without a break. That is something you cannot achieve with human chat support. Also, a single chat agent cannot attend two different customers at the same time. Chatbots have no issues handling multiple customers at the same time without any work fatigue or burnout.
2. Continuous learning
Unlike us (the humans), who took millions of years to evolve, the chatbots learn and update independently with each conversation. Like most of the AI-based technologies, chatbots are also adaptive. And learn continuously to improve their services over time.
For example if we talk about Google Duplex, it have the capability to change the future of customer services. Furthermore, the bots can help you deliver personalized assistance to the customers. Since the bots learn the habits and behaviour of a user to create individual profiles, you can leverage this feature to know your customers better.
3. Cost-effectiveness
In today’s date, when every business is looking for ways to cut their expenses, customer support is one thing where you cannot afford to compromise. However, the introduction of chatbots has turned the table in favour of the businesses. In fact, developing chatbots is cheaper than developing a mobile app.
As soon as you integrate chatbots in your business, you do not need to think about spending any capital on the customer support department. Even though you may need to make certain adjustments in the bots from time to time, it is still going to be more cost-effective than having a team of customer support executives.
4. A myriad of use
Besides customer support, chatbots have several other uses as well. Even though most businesses use bots to provide answers to product/service-related questions, these bots can also be used to schedule meetings and appointments, offer human resources assistance, and help with advertising.
Smooch is a chatbot that allows the businesses to connect multiple social media channels for advertising while performing its primary job of offering modern messaging experiences. Furthermore, chatbots can be used in organizing and tracking unstructured data that has the potential of leading to a better understanding of the users. So technically, they can be used developing marketing strategies as well.
The disadvantages of chatbot usage
1. Limited responses
Even though the chatbots are adaptive, they still fail to respond to the customer queries beyond their coded instructions. If you are in a business, where customers come with a variety of queries and requests, having chatbots may not be very useful for you.
Evidently, chatbots are not ideal for the B2B companies that offer various consultations to their clients in a certain area. Since improvisation is not a strong suit for the chatbots, it is better to leave this technology for businesses like cab services, food delivery services and retail businesses where the customer queries cannot be framed into templates for the chatbots.
2. Poor customer retention
İlker Köksal, the CEO of BotAnalytics exclaimed that around 40 per cent of the users never got past the first text when they interacted with chatbots. The other 25 per cent of the people dropped off after the second message. In 2016, the monthly retention rate for bots was sitting at 7 per cent.
However, a weather app named Poncho managed to get positive retention using chatbots. Unfortunately, it was shut down in 2018. While the app has discontinued, it has given a clear indication that the businesses need to work on the engagement capabilities of their bots. Performing A/B testing can be the best way to learn what works best for a company.
3. Limited audience
Before you decide to adopt chatbots for business, you need to know that chatbots are quite effective for the audience aged 13-19. Also, 81 per cent of the users is from the US. So, if you do not cater to American teenagers, you need to reconsider integrating chatbots into your business.
Analyze your product/service and target audience before you think about having chatbots for your customer services. Even though a lot of businesses are using chatbots at their full extent, it still needs some time for the world to get used to with the services provided by the bots.
4. Susceptible to errors
While the chatbots can eliminate the risk of human errors, they aren’t exactly 100% accurate. There are instances where the bots can get confused by a customer’s request, especially when the query is placed outside the bot’s query templates. In such situations, the bots usually lose track of the conversation and go off-topic.
Since the bots don’t understand sarcasm and other ambivalent human expressions, they often get confused by the complex responses from the customers. This is why they often end up providing incorrect and irrelevant responses to customers.
The takeaway
Since the beginning of mankind, people with better tools had the edge over the others. In today’s competitive market, a business that has the most advanced technology is more likely to rule the industry. Chatbots are certainly one of the most effective tools in today’s date that offer a speedy response, adaptive interface, cost-effective and several other offerings. But it is not exactly perfect; at least, not for now.
If you think it will be a good idea to introduce chatbots in your business just because everyone else is doing it, then you are wrong. You need to understand the needs of your customer as well as the functionalities of this tool to create a proper strategy for a synchronized customer support operation. If you are looking at chatbots as a shortcut to success, you are sorely mistaken.