3 ms·

The expectation for chatbots to completely solve and answer user questions and take over support is as flawed as the expectation that self-driving technologies

by hw 8y ago

The expectation for chatbots to completely solve and answer user questions and take over support is as flawed as the expectation that self-driving technologies in cars allow people to watch Youtube videos and not pay attention to the road or have a hand on the wheel. The successful bots are ones that don't attempt to understand and respond to every single question perfectly, but instead act as a supplemental tool / guide and offering concrete decision points and actions for the user to take. For example, instead of asking "How can we reach you?" and letting the user enter free text and figuring out if the user entered a phone number or email or some random text that just short circuits the bot, show two buttons "Via email", "Via phone" and clicking each one would then ask for an email, or phone number. The successful bots also know when to failover to a human being and failing over fast. I've hardly ever had a good experience dealing with sites that employ chat bots and it's not great to be frustrated by a bot when I'm already an angry customer who hasn't received my order.

jacobwilliamroy 8y ago
The one case where chatbots were better than people was at a company I used to work for. We kept getting customers contacting us via facebook to ask the same questions over and over again. "How much does `x` cost?" "When are you open?" "Where is your location?" "Do you have `y`?" I had to have an internet-connected phone on me at all times because people would send messages at any hour and response time was a factor in our discoverability on facebook. Of course all of these questions were answered on our website (AND ON OUR FACEBOOK PAGE) but simply responding with a URL resulted in attrition. So I found myself running through the same script several times, all day, all night, every day, every night. The best solution would have been to set up some kind of text parser which would allow people to navigate the website through facebook messenger (oversimplifying) and then alert a human if it couldn't parse the input. We could even have hooked it into the comment feed because facebook was really bad at notifying us of comments. Taking it a step further, the Mero Mero's dream of offering facebook marketing to other companies as a service would actually be reasonable, because it wouldn't just be me sending out hundreds of copypastas 24-hours a day, forever. But I was never able to put a system together because of other time-consuming duties the company needed me to perform.
- fl0wenol 8y ago
  This, a million times this. This is how chatbot functionality should be implemented. Like those "chat with us" links you see on a website that drops you into a window and you get put in someone's queue. It doesn't actually wake them up until the chatbot frontend can't handle the users' request using NLP/decision trees/regex (depending on your level of sophistication of user), and then the whole log is sent to the tech support guy when they get free of the last chat and can read through it and take control.
darepublic 8y ago
Maybe the optimistic timelines are flawed but I think its at least reasonable to believe we'll get there someday, in regards to both intelligent chatbot + self-driving tech

by hw 8y ago

jacobwilliamroy 8y ago

The one case where chatbots were better than people was at a company I used to work for. We kept getting customers contacting us via facebook to ask the same questions over and over again. "How much does `x` cost?" "When are you open?" "Where is your location?" "Do you have `y`?" I had to have an internet-connected phone on me at all times because people would send messages at any hour and response time was a factor in our discoverability on facebook. Of course all of these questions were answered on our website (AND ON OUR FACEBOOK PAGE) but simply responding with a URL resulted in attrition. So I found myself running through the same script several times, all day, all night, every day, every night. The best solution would have been to set up some kind of text parser which would allow people to navigate the website through facebook messenger (oversimplifying) and then alert a human if it couldn't parse the input. We could even have hooked it into the comment feed because facebook was really bad at notifying us of comments. Taking it a step further, the Mero Mero's dream of offering facebook marketing to other companies as a service would actually be reasonable, because it wouldn't just be me sending out hundreds of copypastas 24-hours a day, forever. But I was never able to put a system together because of other time-consuming duties the company needed me to perform.

fl0wenol 8y ago
This, a million times this. This is how chatbot functionality should be implemented. Like those "chat with us" links you see on a website that drops you into a window and you get put in someone's queue. It doesn't actually wake them up until the chatbot frontend can't handle the users' request using NLP/decision trees/regex (depending on your level of sophistication of user), and then the whole log is sent to the tech support guy when they get free of the last chat and can read through it and take control.

darepublic 8y ago

Maybe the optimistic timelines are flawed but I think its at least reasonable to believe we'll get there someday, in regards to both intelligent chatbot + self-driving tech