Why using a Chatbot can be extremely risky

Today’s video is about a really trendy subject: chatbot.

While very useful in some cases, especially for predetermined questions, it might be really risky in others. Instead of delivering a good user experience, it might frustrate customers. Chatbots’ technologies are not yet advanced enough to really interact as a human being.

In this video our CEO Riccardo Osti will cover the definition of Chatbots, its main usability, advantages, and of course, disadvantages.

 

In this video, we will talk about something very trending these days: we are talking about chatbots.

Well, it is a computer program designed to simulate conversations with humans over the Internet. In other words, we are all familiar with online chats, which appear on all kinds of websites.

Chatbots are used for different reasons, but the most common ones are:

• Placing an order
• Requesting a service
• Answer common questions
• And collect information about users

The main advantages of chatbots are :

• the fact that they operate twenty-four seven,
• they can potentially offer personalization to each customer (this is of course based on the information available in the company’s database),
• and most importantly…they are pretty much inexpensive

So far so good! However, I must say that the technology behind chatbots is still rudimental. It doesn’t really matter if you use a complex linguistic-based natural language processor or a heavily trained machine learning algorithm… in fact, humans are so creative and unpredictable that it is still too hard for a machine to provide the right answers all the time.

Using chatbots makes sense in all cases where you usually get users through a predetermined list of questions. For example, running a questionnaire using a chatbot could be very interactive and less boring than a static one.

In general, using a chatbot is ok in areas where the creativity of the users is somehow limited. In fact, limiting the scope of the conversation helps the developers to focus on specific situations, and consequently, accelerate the improvements of the conversations.

On the contrary, chatbots shouldn’t be used where users can have free conversations or where they expect to interact with a real human being. The most negative experience is when users are not informed that they are having an interaction with a chatbot, but they find out themselves while they interact with it.

Overall, we are happy to give it a try to new technologies, but we really want to be sure we are asked for it, and it doesn’t come as a surprise! Don’t we?

Long story short, use chatbots to automate structured processes that are usually boring. But don’t use it to replace humans, yet. We are still better than what you think!