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> E.g. add a bot that will instantly reply to frequently asked questions to decrease the load of your customer support team. And when the bot doesn't understand requests, don't make it say "sorry I don't understand", just leave the question and a human will reply later (and maybe send a message with expected timeframe for human response).

Why not just present your users with your FAQ and a search box prior to them chatting with an agent? If most customers write in to support on questions that they would've found answers to via an FAQ, wouldn't that work? You don't need a bot for that, and it's just more load on a customer to try and understand the interface to the bot.

I think bots are going to be big in customer support or in conversations between a customer and a business, but I feel like a lot of bots are being built to try and replace the human connection between customer and the business, which I think is the wrong approach.

One experience I had with a bank that was hard in the past was querying specific account information, specifically routing numbers. Either search would tell me where to look on a check (great let me go find those) or give a generic FAQ. A chat interface can provide that without having weird navigation to boot. To be fair the bank did fix that search recently so it shows me my actual routing numbers now.

Also I just spent 50 minutes in chat with either a bot (or possibly human named Anil) with Comcast trying to sort out a billing issue. Spent 20 minutes trying to point out the lines in the bill I was disputing though I got the credit but I'm not sure if they actually knew why they were giving it. I'm not sure if it would have been faster to call by phone (usually not) but I thought I'd try the chat interface. I wonder if a good bot might be able to figure out context and get a human involved and give them relevant context faster and sped that interaction up.

> Why not just present your users with your FAQ and a search box prior to them chatting with an agent?

Because e.g. the user asked the question on Facebook Messenger. And you don't want to send them to your website when you can reply instantly, right there.

> You don't need a bot for that, and it's just more load on a customer to try and understand the interface to the bot.

I'm actually advocating for bots with no interface, no IRC-like commands. The customer sends the question via chat. If the bot understands it replies instantly, if not a support person replies. Simple. No "type X for whatever" or "sorry I didn't understand your request".

> I feel like a lot of bots are being built to try and replace the human connection between customer and the business, which I think is the wrong approach.

We're definitely on the same page. :)

> Because e.g. the user asked the question on Facebook Messenger. And you don't want to send them to your website when you can reply instantly, right there.

You're defending the use of a bot for a scenario that only occurs because the bot exists.

No, please read the full thread. The scenario is the following:

There are currently hundreds of thousands of Facebook pages which receive dozens of customer support questions every day via Messenger.

My point is that a bot can be used reply instantly to frequently asked questions and leave more sophisticated questions to humans. I'm not defending any fancy use of bots. Just simple use cases like this.

> - instant answers to frequently asked questions > - surveys and polls over chat

I don't understand the bot part of this. First looks like a search box over faqs and second sounds like a web wizard survey .

Look at Wikipedia definition of bot (or other definitions on the first page when searching Google) "Typically, bots perform tasks that are both simple and structurally repetitive, at a much higher rate than would be possible for a human alone."

I think "instant answers to frequently asked questions and surveys and polls over chat" (with some NLP to make it better) surely match that definition, no?

I don't understand why everyone is so fixated on the AI/conversation aspect. :)

With the current state of the technology, companies can benefit by using bots to enhance human-to-human conversations, not trying to replace them altogether.

> companies can benefit by using bots to enhance human-to-human conversations, not trying to replace them altogether.

I think you hit the nail on the head here. Bots should be a complement to human conversations, not a replacement. Having a bot doesn't mean you hire less customer support agents, it just makes them more productive.

Often times, it really means you hire less since there's less support load. E.g. we have a customer which support requests are more than 90% frequently asked questions. Adding a bot to their Facebook page decreased their support load from full time to at most 1h a day. :)

But as you mentioned, when using a bot, the goal should be customer happiness, not cutting costs.

Your line of thinking here really resonates with me. I'm building services on top of two bots right now that fit into this transactional "I want to do X in as little time as possible" category and I think Messenger bots are a fantastic way to achieve that.

> I think Messenger bots are a fantastic way to achieve that.

And a fantastic way of building your bot on top of the platform of a 3rd party, which, at any time and for no reasons, can cut you off.

When you have a very active Facebook page with thousands of fans, you'll get dozen of questions every day via Messenger. A bot can help with that.

And I agree with you. If you weren't using Facebook to reach customers in the past, there's no point building a Messenger bot.