3 ms·

1. "Chatbots" is horrible branding. Especially with the hype coming near the unfortunate timing of Russian bots interfering in the US election. 2. "Chatbot" ma

1. "Chatbots" is horrible branding. Especially with the hype coming near the unfortunate timing of Russian bots interfering in the US election. 2. "Chatbot" makes me think the user is leading the conversation. The bot is interpreting what the human says, and then the bot tries to respond appropriately. This leads to customer service or operations (like calling a car) use cases. These specific use cases are hard to pilot, hard to get right and really tricky to show value to the user or the company. I've never seen a compelling problem/solution/use case for customer service chatbots. The math doesn't work. 3. Messaging is a real channel. It has advantages over phone calls, email, direct mail and even face to face conversations. Chatbots just aren't the right concept for the messaging channel. Dentist reminders work great for instance. 4. If you like thinking about this stuff, I do a podcast all about messaging. It's called The Chat Bubble, and this episode is a good place to start if you want to go deep on FB Messenger. http://thechatbubble.com/2017/11/edit-content-the-playbook-overview-the-4-top-marketing-use-cases-for-facebook-messenger/ http://thechatbubble.com/2017/11/edit-content-the-playbook-o...

ntsh34nteu09 8y ago
I'm curious about #3. I've done some online chats with tech support where I was chatting with a real person, and I found them infuriating. First there was the very fake small talk the reps are required to do. Then there are the long pauses between when I input information and when they react to it because they're clearly chatting with 4 or more different people at the same time. Then they don't really read what I wrote carefully and give answers that make no sense or that I've already said don't work. Like anything, it depends on how the person on the other end acts, but in my experience, they're set up to make the interaction repulsive.

ntsh34nteu09 8y ago

I'm curious about #3. I've done some online chats with tech support where I was chatting with a real person, and I found them infuriating. First there was the very fake small talk the reps are required to do. Then there are the long pauses between when I input information and when they react to it because they're clearly chatting with 4 or more different people at the same time. Then they don't really read what I wrote carefully and give answers that make no sense or that I've already said don't work. Like anything, it depends on how the person on the other end acts, but in my experience, they're set up to make the interaction repulsive.