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The chatbot saves money. Simple as that. People get served by chatbots, get frustrated, and majority gives up and doesn't bother the company with the problem.

The chatbot saves money. Simple as that. People get served by chatbots, get frustrated, and majority gives up and doesn't bother the company with the problem. It doesn't really matter how the chatbot saves the money, they can just see the end results and use the money for bonuses instead.

Maxion 5y ago
>People get served by chatbots, get frustrated, and majority gives up and doesn't bother the company with the problem. With customer service systems I have to disagree here. I've got experience working with these issues and for the vast majority of companies most contacts to customer support are for small, banal, things that current crappy chatbots can easily solve. The 80-20 rule works here too. Bad companies try to do too many things with their chatbots, and use it as a way to make it harder for customers to actually get to talk to a human. Good companies use them to allow customers to solve common issues faster than getting a real human on the line. Then there's the other issue of how people want to find information - some people want to find it themselfes and do not want to talk to a person, whereas others specifically want to ask someone and do not want to look at all. For the latter group, no chat bot or fancy autocomplete knwoledgebase (Looking at you Zendesk) or similar will work. They'll always try to contact support as their first step, and they will get very frustrated if you make it impossible. If your a more software oriented company, it can be very benificial to have software developers (or even a team, if you're a larger company) devoted to helping support. The majority of issues customers contact support for are UI/UX or business process related, and if you systematically start to solve them you will reduce customer support burden and customer support related costs.
- ghaff 5y ago
  I suspect that in a forum like this one, most of the people get pushed into customer support when they've probably exhausted online resources (though we also all screw up from time to time). So, most of the time, you're dealing with a chatbot (or for that matter an L1 CSR--which often isn't a lot better) when you really need a human with some experience and agency to make things better. I even had a weird thing with Apple a couple of weeks ago. Some edge case related to buying something. The chatbot and telephone tree was as frustrating as anywhere else but once I got to an appropriate person it was trivial to solve.
- jacquesm 5y ago
  > The 80-20 rule works here too. Yes, and that's the problem: solving 80% of the problems may be a net positive for the company, but it is a net negative for the users: they are now interacting a bunch of time with a device that isn't able to solve their problem, resulting in a negative experience for 20% of the customers. If a waiter would refuse to help 20% of the customers by pretending to take their orders but not actually doing anything with them then that would kill the place where that person worked. Solutions like these should not work better than 50%, they should work as often as a human on the other end would work, so closer to 100% including escalation options in case it ends up not working after all.
DangitBobby 5y ago
That's definitely how some companies use it. I needed a human from Comcast to help me with something, and instead of getting me on with a human (after spending a few minutes on the phone trying to communicate to the bot why I needed to talk to someone) it sent me an SMS with a link to their online chatbot and promptly hung up. I then called back and said my reason for calling was to "cancel my service," which of course got me through immediately to a human.
phkahler 5y ago
>> The chatbot saves money. Simple as that. People get served by chatbots, get frustrated, and majority gives up and doesn't bother the company with the problem. That's not going to serve the company when they deploy it to take orders at a drive-thru. McDonalds pushing the state of the art, now that's interesting!
- mcswell 5y ago
  I understand they're even putting in conveyor belts in some drive-in restaurants There was a time when the little girls came running out in short little skirts. Remember them? You pull in and the little girl would come running up. "May I take your order sir?" "Yes, but I don't believe it's on the menu, ha ha" They don't, they don't let you flirt any more now. They give you a little green box with a white button on it A little speaker grill... (from https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/peterpaulandmary/paultalk.html https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/peterpaulandmary/paultalk.ht..., c.1960s)
- throwawayboise 5y ago
  I don't go to McDonalds much anymore, but if I ever detect that I'm talking to a machine I will just drive away. I don't use the order kiosks either, because they take 5x as long as just telling a person that I want a Big Mac, fries, and a medium Coke. I can say that faster than I can even get to step 1 on the kiosk.
FriedrichN 5y ago
In the short term, yes. But if customers have a consistent bad experience with the products or services of a company they will stop doing business with them. I routinely buy products from one place where I know the service is better (delivery, returns, helpdesk) than somewhere else where it might be cheaper. I don't think that if you want to be in business for a long time, aiming to frustrate your customers is a good idea, assuming you don't have some monopoly position.

Maxion 5y ago

>People get served by chatbots, get frustrated, and majority gives up and doesn't bother the company with the problem. With customer service systems I have to disagree here. I've got experience working with these issues and for the vast majority of companies most contacts to customer support are for small, banal, things that current crappy chatbots can easily solve. The 80-20 rule works here too. Bad companies try to do too many things with their chatbots, and use it as a way to make it harder for customers to actually get to talk to a human. Good companies use them to allow customers to solve common issues faster than getting a real human on the line. Then there's the other issue of how people want to find information - some people want to find it themselfes and do not want to talk to a person, whereas others specifically want to ask someone and do not want to look at all. For the latter group, no chat bot or fancy autocomplete knwoledgebase (Looking at you Zendesk) or similar will work. They'll always try to contact support as their first step, and they will get very frustrated if you make it impossible. If your a more software oriented company, it can be very benificial to have software developers (or even a team, if you're a larger company) devoted to helping support. The majority of issues customers contact support for are UI/UX or business process related, and if you systematically start to solve them you will reduce customer support burden and customer support related costs.

ghaff 5y ago
I suspect that in a forum like this one, most of the people get pushed into customer support when they've probably exhausted online resources (though we also all screw up from time to time). So, most of the time, you're dealing with a chatbot (or for that matter an L1 CSR--which often isn't a lot better) when you really need a human with some experience and agency to make things better. I even had a weird thing with Apple a couple of weeks ago. Some edge case related to buying something. The chatbot and telephone tree was as frustrating as anywhere else but once I got to an appropriate person it was trivial to solve.
jacquesm 5y ago
> The 80-20 rule works here too. Yes, and that's the problem: solving 80% of the problems may be a net positive for the company, but it is a net negative for the users: they are now interacting a bunch of time with a device that isn't able to solve their problem, resulting in a negative experience for 20% of the customers. If a waiter would refuse to help 20% of the customers by pretending to take their orders but not actually doing anything with them then that would kill the place where that person worked. Solutions like these should not work better than 50%, they should work as often as a human on the other end would work, so closer to 100% including escalation options in case it ends up not working after all.

DangitBobby 5y ago

That's definitely how some companies use it. I needed a human from Comcast to help me with something, and instead of getting me on with a human (after spending a few minutes on the phone trying to communicate to the bot why I needed to talk to someone) it sent me an SMS with a link to their online chatbot and promptly hung up. I then called back and said my reason for calling was to "cancel my service," which of course got me through immediately to a human.

phkahler 5y ago

>> The chatbot saves money. Simple as that. People get served by chatbots, get frustrated, and majority gives up and doesn't bother the company with the problem. That's not going to serve the company when they deploy it to take orders at a drive-thru. McDonalds pushing the state of the art, now that's interesting!

mcswell 5y ago
I understand they're even putting in conveyor belts in some drive-in restaurants There was a time when the little girls came running out in short little skirts. Remember them? You pull in and the little girl would come running up. "May I take your order sir?" "Yes, but I don't believe it's on the menu, ha ha" They don't, they don't let you flirt any more now. They give you a little green box with a white button on it A little speaker grill... (from https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/peterpaulandmary/paultalk.html https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/peterpaulandmary/paultalk.ht..., c.1960s)
throwawayboise 5y ago
I don't go to McDonalds much anymore, but if I ever detect that I'm talking to a machine I will just drive away. I don't use the order kiosks either, because they take 5x as long as just telling a person that I want a Big Mac, fries, and a medium Coke. I can say that faster than I can even get to step 1 on the kiosk.

FriedrichN 5y ago

In the short term, yes. But if customers have a consistent bad experience with the products or services of a company they will stop doing business with them. I routinely buy products from one place where I know the service is better (delivery, returns, helpdesk) than somewhere else where it might be cheaper. I don't think that if you want to be in business for a long time, aiming to frustrate your customers is a good idea, assuming you don't have some monopoly position.