When Bad UX Happens to Conversational Chatbots: 3 Customer Experience Fails (and what to do instead)

In a perfect world, your small business could deploy a chatbot, sit back, and watch as the happy customers — and increased conversions — roll in. But, all chatbots are not created equal and bad conversational chatbots could ruin your customer experience and damage your brand.

As a small business, you’ve seen chatbots help brands in ways you could never have imagined. They’re everywhere now: keeping customers company when they can’t get to sleep; helping people learn new languages faster, and quickly resolving hundreds of queries without increasing business costs. Now customers can plan a holiday with friends in one window, and book flights in another. Bank clients can check balances and complete transfers using WhatsApp.

You’ve been doing your research, so you may know live chat software reports a 73 percent customer satisfaction rate. You must realize by now that conversational chatbots can help take the busy-work out of common customer transactions. And that’s important to any business. You want to make it easy for your customers to reach you, and you know chatbots can help achieve your vision.

We examine the most common chatbot customer experience fails, and offer ways you can use live chat software like Clickatell Touch to create a customer experience that aligns with your small business missions, and positively impacts your bottom line.

Chatbot fails that damage the customer experience

While it’s clear that chatbots are in demand, they don’t always provide a great customer experience. Bad chatbots will annoy your customers and waste their time.

People are more frustrated by chatbots that can’t answer their questions than they would be by human customer service reps who can’t solve their problem immediately. If a customer perceives a chatbot experience as negative, over 70 percent wouldn’t use that chatbot again.

It’s easy to get it wrong, and that’s why you need an application that complements the efforts you’re making to improve customer satisfaction.

Failing to develop a customer-facing chatbot strategy

It’s tempting to jump on the bot-wagon, but before you deploy a chatbot — as is the case with any new tech — you need a strategy.

Your strategy details the bot’s role, and the manner in which it will meet customer needs.

In outlining the purpose and mission of the chatbot, UX Booth columnist Jennifer Leigh Brown advises asking the following questions:

• Who is your audience?
• What are they looking for?
• What service will you provide via your channel? What problem will it solve or common task can it make easier or faster?
• How does your strategy align with your business or marketing objectives?

To get these answers, begin with user research. You’ll discover trends and patterns revealing the common queries your customers need help with. In addition to speaking with staff, check your CRM. This is how you lay the groundwork for a chatbot that delivers value by helping your customers to accomplish tasks and freeing customer service teams up by reducing the volume of routine tasks.

On top of zeroing in on your chatbot’s purpose, you need to consider how it will integrate into your existing applications. A chatbot implemented in a silo won’t help deliver business results.

The UX Collective articulates the harm caused by bots operating in isolation:

“Let’s say you are creating a bot to book appointments at a spa. If your chatbot does not communicate with the spa’s existing appointment management system, that means extra work for the business owner to handle requests coming through this new channel — and ultimately lack of consistency for the user.”

Ensure that your software integrates easily into your existing applications and infrastructure. The less coding required, the better as well — the last thing you want to do is place an additional burden on your team of developers. Of course, you also need to be sure that you can deploy seamlessly across multiple communication channels where your customers are already asking for your help — like Facebook and Twitter, for example.

Getting your chatbot to multi-task

One of the biggest mistakes a business can make is getting its chatbot to do too many things. Based on your user research, get your chatbot to do a few key things, and make sure it performs these tasks incredibly well. On top of that, have your chatbot introduce itself and list its functions to help manage your customers’ expectations and keep their questions on track.

Human-in-the-loop

Let’s face it, your chatbot will only be able to answer a certain number of questions and that’s when you’re going to need it to hand the customer over to your more than capable customer service agent.

In Medium’s UX Collective, Josh Barkin writes about the quest to design chatbots with improved fallback design: the ability to provide better answers, and when they can’t understand, to connect the customer to a human.

Ready to embark on the journey?

Conversational chatbots give your customers a fast way to connect with your brand. They’re becoming a standard feature of businesses, and organizations who don’t keep up may see declining relevance and sales. Learn more about using conversational chatbots to drive leads for your marketing strategy in this recent article on the topic.

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