Bot or Not?
Responsive (by) Design — Part 2
This is the second post of a small series of articles that depicts how businesses can leverage the power of conversation in the new messaging paradigm.
If you haven’t yet, check out how Broid can help your business on social messaging.
Previous posts:
Being available via social messaging is great for your brand but being quick to respond is even more important.
Hey look at that! You’re here!
It’s quite difficult today to avoid the subject of bots, especially when you’re talking about social messaging. So, let’s get to it.
“Here we go, yet another blog post lauding chatbots and praising artificial intelligence to the sky” you say?
Well… hem… we’ll see about that.
And please, forgive my lame puns…
🎶 Make it a botter place 🎶
If you’re reading this article then there is a 99% chance that you’ve, at least, heard about chatbots and probably used one already (if not well, try this one).
Yes, there has been a big rush on bots in the past year and we have Facebook to thank for that. In 2016, during the F8, Facebook released its Messenger API, designed for bots, hence opening up the gates to a billion users.
So of course, a lot of people rushed at the opportunity and now, there are well over 100 000 chatbots available (just on Messenger).
Let’s see how they could help your business.
Sleepless agents
24/7 : that’s basically when a chatbot is available, which is a considerable advantage when you’re looking for responsiveness. Especially for small businesses that do not have a sufficient staffing to make sure that requests are answered in timely manner. Another point would be that even if requests are not resolved immediately by the bot (for example if the issue is escalated to a human), users can still have the feeling that they’ve been heard and cared for.
Top two reasons for customer loss:
1. Customers feel poorly treated
2. Failure to solve a problem in a timely manner
(Harris Interactive)
Mutli-tasks
Compared to the “limited” human, a bot can handle any number of instant conversations (well, to the extent of the machinery behind). Gone is the wait for your users. Same goes for the “attention-span”: a chatbot will be able to answer very different requests without having to refocus on the actual conversation.
Time-savers
Bots can save a lot of time for your team as they can shunt requests to the most relevant person/department. For example, if a user asks a question about the pricing, the bot can redirect the conversation to the sales team while a question about a previous order will be sent to the customer service department.
Brand ambassadors
If you put enough work into a bot, you can also skillfully craft it to maintain your image and brand. And since it’s built to offer great customer service, it should definitely improve your reputation.
Effective broadcasters
With an 80% open rate, messaging is way ahead of email. Using bots to broadcast your content & offers will reliably ensure that your messages are read by your subscribers.
🆘🔴 ️A bo(r)t Mission 🆘🔴
But bots are not perfect, far from it actually and here’s why.
J.A.R.V.N.I.S — Just A Rather Very Not Intelligent System
Let’s be honest for a second: the vast majority of chatbots aren’t smart. They are basically built upon IF/THEN rules and decision-tree logic. Should the user input something that is not a known keyword, the your bot will probably go AWOL.
So most bots are as intelligent as the actual work put into it by the designer/programmer who created it to anticipate all potential user use cases.
NLU (Neuro-Linguistic Understanding) does exist but it’s way out of reach from 99% of existing bots (Facebook reported disillusioning failure rates: the Messenger bots fail to complete 70 percent of user requests).
Conversation Design
Chatbots remain an interface so content and objectives need to be designed accordingly. “You wouldn’t use a fork to do the job of a knife, right? Then don’t use a chatbot to perform the functions of a call center. Think about it: If you apply an old strategy to a new platform, you still have an old strategy.”
Machine-to-Machine communication
I’ll repeat myself but it’s important: a bot is just an interface. So ultimately, if you don’t integrate it with your existing system, it will create extra work for your team to handle requests coming from that new channel. For example, a chatbot that books appointments not integrated to the booking system. Furthermore, chances are some requests will be missed or with wrong inputs bringing down customer satisfaction.
User expectations…
…are high, be they from a bot or a human agent. Even if it can be a huge benefit to your business, designing, building and testing a reliable bot available on multiple channels will be a really big project.
So before going further, think about this:
- Is your use case strong enough to justify that you’ll spend a bit amount of time/money on it?
- Are your goals clearly identified
- Can the existing tech enable you to reach them?
- Are all your departments ready to work together on this project (marketing, customer service, IT, sales, etc.)
Customer service shouldn’t just be A department, it should be the entire company.”- Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos
You see, maybe a bot is not the right solution for your business, at least not now.
Stay tuned, in the next post we’ll cover “botless” strategies.
Being available on several messaging channels is a pain. It’s time and money you’re not spending on your real added value.
With more than 20 messaging apps integrations, a state-of-the-art Web Messenger, all the most powerful conversational features in a single API: Broid is the best developer-first platform for scaling your Social Messaging game.
Because we eliminate the needless complexity of API integrations, you can start conversing on a dozen channels in 30 lines of code and keep your focus on your product.
Broid is open-source based, check out our GitHub Repositories.
Built with ♥︎ in Montréal, Canada
