Are chatbots the silver bullet to online CX?

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Chatbots mimic written and verbal speech. Essentially, they allow customers to feel as though they are speaking to an actual person. They can be introduced to various online platforms, including websites, social media platforms (such as Facebook and WhatsApp), and mobile apps.

Chatbots offer customers a number of benefits, such as 24-hours-a-day service, instant responses, answers to simple questions, and relatively easy communication. And the benefits are not only one-sided: marketers also see benefits from using chatbots. These include improved levels of service satisfaction, the optimisation of costs, and the opportunity to gain insights into their consumers’ behaviour.

Although chatbots offer a range of benefits, 60% of consumers would prefer to wait in a queue if it meant that they could speak to a real human being, but are willing to start by talking first to a chatbot. This suggests that the notion of using a chatbot to enhance the customer’s experience is not being realised. Introducing a chatbot is simply not enough: marketers need to understand that chatbots should be used to enhance the customer’s experience.

To do that, the following points should be considered:

• Keep in mind that a chatbot is not a person: the ways in which a chatbot and a human interact with a customer will always differ.

  Although the first instinct may be to attempt to make the chatbot appear like a human (for example, ‘Hi, I’m Sam, how can I help you?’), in order to maintain trust levels it is important to be transparent and to acknowledge that it is in fact a chatbot (for example, ‘Hi, I’m Sam and I’m a chatbot, how can I help you?).

• Developing the chatbot’s persona: a persona assists in understanding the chatbot’s character, which requires exploring users’ characteristics (their hobbies, interests, and descriptors), the brand (if the brand were a person, who would it be?), and the chatbot’s purpose (what role is the chatbot going to fulfill?).

• Build a personality for the chatbot: in order to enhance the human element of a chatbot, it should have a personality. Incorporating personality traits (for example, being outgoing, funny, helpful) provides a guideline for how the chatbot will respond through language, mood, tone, and style. Each response will communicate the chatbot’s personality; and so it would be useful if the chatbot reflected the customer’s persona so that there is a level of relatability.

• Combine live-chat capability with the chatbot: live-chat functionality and chatbots should not operate in isolation: they should be integrated. The chatbot can begin the engagement, and possibly assist with easier queries while still offering the live-chat option if the query required human assistance. The chatbot could do the groundwork (for example, verifying the customer’s details), allowing the live-chat to be more efficient for both the customer and the organisation.

• Continually review the insights: chatbot transcripts offer the organisation a lot of rich data that can be analysed to obtain better insights into customers. For instance, if a particular question were often asked by a number of customers, the company could add the question to the list of questions that the customer could click on when starting the conversation with the chatbot.

Using these points, marketers would be in a better position to develop an engaging chatbot that adds to the customer’s experience instead of leading to frustrations and limited value-add from both the customer’s and organisation’s perspective.