Chatbots are one of the hottest topics in technology today. We read and hear a lot about it, including a number of misconceptions. Will they destroy jobs? Are they all based on AI? Julien Rio, Head of Marketing at Dimelo, looks at what the experts have to say about this growing technology.
The interest for bots is not going to slow down: a study shows that 80% of businesses want to start using chatbots in the next two years. To implement the technology properly, companies should be aware of the real potential and limitations.
Like any new technology, chatbots arouse hopes and fears. Now that companies are in-tegrating it into their strategies, we can better understand how it is beneficial for both companies and customers alike.
To help you implement your chatbot and know what to expect, we have gathered eight of the most common myths about chatbots and have called on industry experts to debunk these myths.
1. Chatbot is a new technology
“Many people think that chatbots have only been around for the last three or four years. In fact, the first chatbot, ELIZA was created in 1966. I myself, have been working with chatbots for nearly 15 years and the Loebner Prize, which is awarded to the world’s most human-like conversational AI, was first held in 1991. Although chatbots are becoming more mainstream and available in many more devices now, they are certainly not a new technology.”
Steve Worswick, Senior AI Developer | Pandorabots.com
2. All chatbots are the same
“Well designed chatbots have distinctive flavours. This will be more obvious in the future. With rapidly advancing innovation, bot authors will be able to focus as much on the expe-rience as the use case.Expect an explosion in contrasts in behaviour, personality, voice and bot graphical UIs as bots become hidden in plain sight in every aspect of our lives.
Sylvain Perron, Director | Botpress.io
3. Chatbots will destroy jobs
“Chatbots are regularly seen as threats by customer relation agents. You must under-stand that they will take the lead on first level requests but you should also assume that they’re empowering agents by giving them the opportunity to focus on second or third level requests that require the ability to mediate (which bots can’t do).”
William Bailey, Head of Strategic Partnerships | Smartly.ai
4. All chatbots are based on AI
“The best chatbots are simple. They ask questions and suggest answers, instead of rely-ing on freeform conversation: the reality is most people prefer to be guided through a conversational experience. It’s simpler, faster, and gets things done. The most successful bots achieve the most meaningful business results by guiding the user through the con-versation, from “Get Started” to getting an answer to their question.
Andrew Demeter, Social Media Manager | Chatfuel
5. Chatbots are only available on Facebook Messenger
“Chatbot existed even before Mark Zuckerberg was born, today businesses are using chatbots in their mobile apps, their live chat support as well. Being the world’s most popu-lar social platform, Facebook Messenger chatbots no doubt are popular but certainly not the only one. In fact, the world’s most popular and intelligent chatbot, Mitsuku, was not built for Facebook Messenger. Mitsuku has won Loebner Prize for most human-like chat-bot just in 2016.”
Usama Noman, CEO | Botsify.com
6. To provide a good customer experience, a chatbot is a must-have
“Facebook Messenger is the new way people contact brands. Last year 330 million peo-ple interacted with a brand via Facebook Messenger. Yet somehow, many people today hesitate before adding a chatbot to their Messenger, fearing that this may “break” the hu-man relationship they have with their audience.
Chatbots won’t be replacing a good customer experience, but can definitely help aug-ment it by automating the easy questions, giving direct access to information and provide instant services. The ultimate customer experience will be offering the good balance be-tween automatization and human relationship.”
Benjamin Merritt, CEO | itsAlive Chabot solutions
7. Building a chatbot is easy
“It’s easy to believe that chatbot is a plug & play technology. But technology is equally im-portant as human resources in the success of your project.
Having built more than 300 chatbots, we now know that you need to push at least an ini-tial 60 to 120 hours of work to set up a project; and a recurring 10 to 50 hours a month to continuously grow the knowledge base and polish the NLP layer of your chatbot. Without this man power, even the best technology ever will fail.”
Luc Truntzler, Associate Director | Inbenta France
8. During a single conversation, it’s not possible to interact with both a chatbot and a human agent
“Talking to chatbots on one side and to human agents on the other is the worst customer experience. The future of customer experience lies in hybrid chatbots which take the best of both worlds; human and AI agents in the same conversation to both increase customer satisfaction and maximize ROI.”
Christophe Chevalier, CEO – Co-Founder | Botmind
By Julien Rio
Head of Marketing
Dimelo
Julien has more than 10 years’ international experience in Marketing and Customer Care positions across multiple industries including toys, medical, hospitality, F&B, logistics, electronics, etc. As Head of Marketing of Dimelo Julien strives for improving customer care worldwide and closing the gap between what companies have to offer and what cus-tomers expect. Author and blogger, Julien regularly writes about customer experience and marketing topics.