5 common misconceptions in the development of chatbots.
Jens Kretschmann
5 misconceptions often stand in the way of your chatbot project's success. Read here what they are and how to avoid them.
Chatbots help companies and brands with lead generation, customer service, and product search. For your customers to interact well with your digital assistant, you should avoid these 5 mistakes.
Chatbots as an alternative to the e-mail newsletter?
No. Rather, chatbots are a valuable enrichment for the communication mix. Especially when it comes to making contact with customers. Conversational assistants often solve problems of users and increase customer satisfaction. At the same time, your customers are willing to give you information about what they want, what they like, or what annoys them. While your customers reach the goal faster and you can, in turn, use the generated data to improve your audience targeting. Not only in your email newsletter, but in your entire marketing mix.
Bottom line: Chatbots improve customer satisfaction!
A chatbot’s quickly made, isn’t it?
Chatbots have a wide range of qualities. A Clickbot with Quick-Reply Buttons can be created in a short time. Just as some chatbots that understand language input. These are based on rigid dialogue trees and feel exactly like that. A chatbot with a more natural conversation behavior means a serious digital project. And an AI Assistant created in this way also can be an ambassador for your brand: With consistent quality, helpful, and as your customers are used to from your products and services.
Bottom line: A chatbot should have a clear goal and be professionally created to achieve it!
Chatbots learn and improve on their own?
Companies spend a lot of money on “perfect” communication. And now a computer system should independently learn how to communicate in the name of your company? And it should use discussion in customer service as the basis for training, where dissatisfaction often dominates? You don’t want that. Because neither would your brand remain recognizable, nor would such a system be compliant in any way. This is why it is essential to have machine learning trained by experts.
Your chatbot only learns from meaningful input and continues to communicate at the desired high level. And in the spirit of your brand.
Bottom line: Chatbots are trained and do not learn uncontrolled “by themselves”!
Chatbots can be trained with logs from the call center.
Call center logs are based on conversations between customers and call center agents. Mostly on the phone. These discussions are usually conducted according to a clear script and are oriented towards processes for solving frequently recurring problems. But a phone call is not a chat. We speak very differently than we write. And also, the interplay in the telephone conversation is entirely different than in the chat.
Therefore the logs from the call center are not useful training data. But they are excellent information and planning basis for the conception of your chatbot. Once your bot is in operation and generating logs itself, then precisely there lies the most significant potential for the training of your chatbot.
Bottom line: The best training data for the chatbot comes from the chat dialogs of the chatbot itself!
Chatbots have to understand everything.
No, they don’t. Chatbots should cover a fixed topic and be good at it. This enables them to process even more complex queries.
Also, you should develop a fallback strategy so that the chatbot can lead users out of dead ends to find a solution in an alternative way.
Bottom line: Chatbots are specialists, not generalists.
When looking at chatbots, I have found that quality often does not meet the requirements of the users. The disappointment is correspondingly great on both sides. At Mercury.ai we offer our Conversational Cloud as well as professional services to make your chatbot project successful.
