Chatbots are killing your business

Despite today’s technology dependent environment, according to CGS’s 2018 Global Consumer Customer Service Survey found that many consumers still prefer human agents to chatbots for their more complex customer service engagements.

The idea of automation and increasing conversation with customers appeals to a lot of brands. Doing this, a bot designer plays an important role at defining how each conversation is scripted and the behaviours users can expect when interacting online with the bot. As this technology continues to grow in prevalence, marketers should be aware of the implications that a bot can cause. Despite the best of intentions, sometimes chatbots fail to deliver user experience that is seamless, delightful and efficient like we envisioned them to be. It is important to make sure that you are aware of all types of bot technology, as many can be capable of killing your marketing efforts right away.

1. Insufficiently savvy chatbots turning prospects off

Many bots are deployed with insufficiently sophisticated artificial intelligence and don’t recognize the context. As most of them are unable to hold information for longer than a few chat bubbles, their cumulative understanding of contextual conversation is usually highly limited.

Online shopping websites use the most of chatbot technology. Artificial intelligence goes a long way for simple interactions, but customers should be able to escalate more complex issues to human employees.

2. Bots lack transparency

The most successful bots make one thing clear from the very beginning of the experience: that the user is chatting with a robot, not with another human. Setting up the right expectations upfront will make users more forgiving about certain mistakes the bot might make. Businesses will want their bot to feel as human as possible, but lying to your users and pretending to be something it is not can lead to irreversible loss of trust.

3. Bots lack proper human escalation protocols

When technology fails, users still want to be able to rely on human beings to help them solve their problems. Very few chatbots have an escalation workflow in place to let a human take over the conversation when the bot is unable to help. Bots can leave users hanging – sometimes even more frustrated than when they started the conversation.

4. Malicious bots can sabotage your SEO

Some bots can republish your content without your consent and steal your search traffic. By illegally copying and redistributing your content on other websites, your search rankings might be degraded, causing your business to be outranked on search engine results. This can lead to being blacklisted by advertising networks if they notice a lot of questionable script activity on your web pages.

5. Hacked chatbots can ruin your brand’s reputation

Artificial Intelligence powered chatbots typically store customer data for analysis and greater personalization in the future. This data is at risk of being stolen by a third-party attacker. Handling private data can be problematic, and even more so in sensitive sectors such as banking or health.

6. Bot attacks can take your whole site down

Bots are capable of taking down your entire website and disrupting any communications hosted on your domain servers. Most shocking is how easily anyone can identify and paralyze an unprotected website for a small fee, with a simple Google search.

Bots can hamper your marketing efforts which can even lead to monetary losses. In other words, develop and deploy chatbots, but keep human agents. Relying completely on automation can push customers away. With the right solutions, one can beat malicious bots and avoid any threats to your marketing efforts. We at VSynergize, mainly focus on providing quality services and great customer experience.