For everything I want to do there should be an UI that is much easier to use than explaining it, even to a human.
For help and troubleshooting chatbots are pretty much useless. If I have a problem doing something via the UI then probably the developer did a bad job and no chatbot will ever do better.
Is there any evidence customers prefer chatbots? The entire concept feels like it's driven by managers trying to impress their managers.
A chatbot is just a long way of saying "GO AWAY!".
Large telecoms do this so they get to shut down their customer support almost entirely while claiming that they are available for the customers.
a large telecom in Australia has applied this to an extreme degree in the last two years to the point that you almost can't contact them no matter how severe the issue is. Their message is clear "SHUT UP AND PAY".
And it is gone now and replaced with a much more effective app, my point is just that it clearly possible to make chatbots that aren't rage inducing.
The question is just if it is worth it, something we didn't think after the novelty wore off.
I believe one way it can provide value is when it is closely backed by competent support staff so it takes more of a receptionist role instead of the role of a support engineer.
It's cost cutting. Customer contact is always treated as a cost center.
Therefore, the only relevant question for its management is "How can we provide the minimum acceptable level of service, at the lowest possible cost?"
In general, the answer to "Why does X suck?" is to ask whether the company sees it as a profit or cost center. See: HR.
"How can we provide the minimum acceptable level of service, at the lowest possible cost?"
Not with all products. Some companies understand, that good support keeps the people loyal to their products. But they are usually in a higher price segment.
Had to RMA an ultra widescreen monitor I use for work, and the experience was as smooth as silk and always in the hands of actual humans, who would follow up and push things forward.
I’ve had their enterprise support on the phone with me for a dozen hours over the course of a week trying to get this SAN working. Their support remoted into it and had me manipulating physical stuff when required. They eventually got it going through a combination of hard resetting everything and updating firmware on half a dozen components + some software updates.
Dell doesn’t always have the greatest hardware, but their support really doesn’t rest until you’re satisfied. “No one ever got fired for buying Dell”.
I’m guessing that’s often not true if you’re running a Wordpress blog or some white label e-commerce platform or similar. You can probably just pase some JavaScript into an admin interface somewhere to add a third-party chatbot to your site.
Recently came across a delivery service which sent an sms announcing a delivery to connect me to a Facebook messenger bot to ask me the order number to give me the delivery information. How is this process better? Just send a link to the tracker and have all the necessary info in one place. Add a button to reach someone if you must.
Also while I’m on my soap box this is a PSA to all ui devs, stop trying to turn every menu/button text into an icon. My mom does not even remember that the button with 3 horizontal lines means menu she is not going to understand that stamp icon means “add a signature.”
The above quote is from the days where people bought shrink wrapped software so it was incredibly hard to observe people using your application in the wild. Therefore, companies spent money to do it in house to get better data.
Modern web applications, I would argue, make observing user behaviour in real time trivially easy but I'm sure lots of companies don't even bother. In turn, this brings us to the incredibly complicated interfaces we have today.
Hi I'm Macy, the Macy's chatbot. Thanks for reaching out! You need to exchange an item, is that correct?
Like the grandparent explains, some people just need a way to explain what they need in their own words and I don't think chatbots completely fail at that. The best one's I've experienced have prescreened me for common issues and then sent me off to a live person as soon as it was clear my request was not easily addressed with the built in script.
For example, my mom has used an iPad daily for many years now. She's never used a laptop or desktop. Rather, she navigates and interacts with an iPad exclusively using Siri and Google voice search--rarely, if ever, touching the keyboard. And she's a (relatively) advanced user.
Granted, to tech savvy users, these interactions are often quite funny. For example, opening the YouTube app, and then doing a voice search for "YouTube videos for how to make chocolate icing YouTube please". :-)
A long time ago – I'm talking early 2000s – I designed a voice UI for a train timetable information system. It was a phone line, you called it up, told it where you were travelling to and from, and it gave you the information you needed.
After launch, I would listen to the odd call at random to see how it was handling things. I distinctly remember one case where, when asked their destination, the user said "I'm going to a funeral".
Now, when somebody said something outside the scope of the expected responses, we would reprompt them up to twice more with a bit of extra guidance. I'm proud to say that, even though this caller started way off course, the system steered them back and they ended up going away with the information they needed.
That's actually a danger of making your conversational interfaces too human-like - people then talk to them like they're humans, and it doesn't go well. You're better to make things a little stiff and robotic, so as to manage their expectations and make them understand that they need to constrain their answers a bit to get what they need. It might feel less natural, but everybody goes home happier at the end of the day.
Why is that? Can't they just check the tracking number? That's a question I had until i tested a few dozen e-commerce solutions and most of them have buried their tracking number under several confusing menus. And even when you get the tracking number, carriers each have confusing ways to track packages.
My experience is Amazon is an enormous pain in the butt to deal with if the delivery service drops your package at the wrong address or there's a hole in the package with nothing in it. Huge pain dealing with those people.
I get that there are scammers out there. But if I get 100 packages per year from amazon for years, some of which have been very expensive, and one outta nowhere they lose my $5 multivitamin, I'm not trying to get rich by fraud but I just want my vitamins.
Also a couple years ago I ordered an obscure stainless steel hinge for woodworking, kind of expensive for stainless steel it was about $8 (solid not plated USA made brass would have been $30+) and Amazon van delivery successfully delivered a bubblewrap envelope with a hole ripped in it because hinges are heavy and bubble wrap envelopes are weak. Its an $8 hinge I just want my hinge can't you ask the amazon employee in the van who delivered it to look on the floor of his van? I'm not angry (yet) but I just want my hinge so I can finish my woodworking project. If I was trying to rip Amazon off then I wouldn't be arguing with somechatbot or someone over a $8 hinge it would be "my box that was supposed to contain a PS5 arrived with a brick in it instead" or similar fraud-smelling situation.
This is why I won't buy consumer electronics from Amazon; they can't deliver a hinge without trying to make a federal case out of it, so if I order a TV with my luck I'm going to get a box of cracked glass with no recourse and long arguments. If I go to best buy the price is worse and the selection is worse and I don't like the experience in general but at least I can slice the box open and see if the glass is smashed before swiping my credit card.
Amazon doesn't have a process for "the delivery people messed up" probably intentionally to save money when the delivery people mess up. Even when the delivery people who messed up are Amazon employees (or contractors)
My point of this ramble, aside from F Amazon, is they set you up to take the blame. They screwed up, the chatbot can't help, the chatbot must be to blame.
The website has a bug where locked accounts are told to change their password, which will change their password via an email process but then your acct is still locked out of course, but you can click here to change your password. Endless loop. Very annoying.
The idiotic chatbot helpfully suggests the way to solve a locked account is to change your password. That's exactly where the bug is, and resetting your password does not unlock the acct which is the problem.
Helpfully the support website says if you wait a day a locked account will be unlocked. That of course is not true.
I've only been working on this since Sunday.
Anyway a fucked up company that is essentially inoperable, when given a chatbot, will merely have one more thing that doesn't work. Its a lot harder to code a chatbot that can fix a locked account than it is to code a website to unlock a locked account, so if they fail the simpler task you know the harder chatbot task would be impossible for them.
I'm hopeful that within a half hour I'll be able to chat with a human rep and gain access to my account. I've been in line for a human for about ten minutes and I'm down to 15th in the queue.
I used to work in telecommunications and I'm glad I don't have to hold a phone to my ear and listen to on-hold music for hours on end like the bad old days, I have multiple monitors and I can just leave this window up for however many hours it takes while working on other monitors.
I just don't understand the problem they are trying to solve.