Technology has undoubtedly disrupted how businesses interact with their customers in digital environments and how sales teams can now be more efficient in addressing people’s requests.
In this advance, chatbots were created a few years ago, arriving with the promise of instant responses and mass personalization, gradually carving out a significant space in consumer interactions. However, over the years and with their use, it’s also true that many users feel a growing distrust and frustration towards this tool.
Why are chatbots currently not the best option for businesses?
Before giving you the reasons, we want you to think about the few experiences you may have had with them—some good, but perhaps mostly frustrating because they didn’t provide a real solution or were not able to understand what you needed.
Now that you’ve thought about it, we can start listing the reasons:
- Lack of empathy and understanding:
- Natural language limitations: Although chatbots have significantly improved, they still struggle to understand natural language in all its complexity, including sarcasm, idiomatic expressions, and emotional nuances. Without this understanding, they cannot communicate effectively with us.
- Inability to build relationships: Without understanding, there are no connections, making it difficult for users to feel understood and attended to.
- Generic and repetitive responses:
- Poor personalization: Often, chatbots offer predefined responses that don’t meet the specific needs of the user, causing frustration. This is because they usually follow a predetermined flow rather than a real conversation.
- Lack of context: Chatbots often struggle to maintain the context of a conversation, leading to irrelevant or incongruent responses.
- Technical issues:
- Slow response times: Load times can sometimes become prolonged, resulting in a poor user experience.
- Errors in understanding: Chatbots can misinterpret the user’s questions, leading to incorrect responses and, once again, user frustration.
- Lack of flexibility:
- Limited problem-solving ability: Chatbots are often limited to a set of predefined questions and answers, so don’t expect them to solve complex problems.
- Inability to transfer to a human agent: In many cases, users feel trapped in a conversation with a chatbot without the option to speak with a real person; this is possible in certain situations but not by user request.
How can we improve the connection between technology and people?
Here are some emerging trends that can provide you with a better tool or a better use of technology for this purpose:
- AI-created agents with personality: At Keybe, we identified all these problems and decided to combine artificial intelligence with the human touch that people always want in their interactions.
This is how we created Biky, the first AI with personality, which serves as the first point of contact, whether for your sales or customer service. She sends voice notes, sounds like a real person, understands images, audio, and text, is aware of the context of situations, and is always ready to rely on the human team if needed.
She is already causing a revolution, and we have many agents like her ready to be hired.
- Co-creation: Customer service and development teams can work together to create more personalized and satisfying experiences. This requires special attention to a natural, intuitive, and easy-to-follow conversational flow, as well as a focus on personalization using user data.
- Continuous measurement and improvement: It is recommended to use analytical tools to identify areas for improvement and optimize chatbot performance, as well as to seek and consider user feedback to understand their opinions and expectations.
To conclude this chapter and answer the initial question, we want to conclude that while chatbots offer many advantages, it is essential to recognize their limitations and work to improve the user experience.
This would be a starting point, but we want to invite you to explore new technologies, as chatbots, without fear of being wrong with this statement, are a thing of the past.
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