Recently, many websites are using chatbots for solving customers queries about their products, services etc.
What are chatbots?
Chatbots are computer software designed to simulate human conversation through text or voice. Nicely, the primary use of chatbots is to answer basic questions from internet site traffic the use of artificial intelligence (AI).
Types of Chatbots
There are two types of chatbots:-
- Linguistic Chatbots
- AI Chatbots
1. Linguistic Chatbot
Linguistic Chatbots are also known as Rule-based chatbots. Facebook messenger is an example of Linguistic Chatbot. These chatbots are can be used to answer some simple questions and also helps in booking tickets, opening mobile apps etc.
2. AI Chatbots
AI Chatbots uses machine learning and uses technology like natural language processing (NLP) to understand user queries. With NLP these bots can understand the human problem without any human assistance.
Why chatbots are used in websites?
Following are reasons why chatbots and used in websites:-
1. Provides valuable info at less time
If any visitor want to find any information about the site or have any query about the site, then rather then filling the form he will press the magic button. With Chatbots they can find the valuable information at very less period of time.
2. Cost Effective
Rather having a call center you will create a chatbot which is less expensive and solve customer's problem within in a second and you don't pay salary to chatbot.
3. Available any time
Call centre will not open 24 hours but chatbot does. Chatbots run on internet which is available 24 hours. You many visit it at any time. Night or day it will work properly.
4. Build Brand trust
As Chatbots are available 24 hours for solving customers' problems, you may also tells your customer about your products/services. Bots create a perfect bond between customer and business.
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Top comments (4)
They were the cool thing a few years ago, but thankfully I rarely, if ever, come across them now. They're generally awful and only benefit the company, rarely the customer. For almost all situations it's quicker, simpler and - to be honest - more pleasant, to deal with a human or interact with a well designed web page.
Companies using them generally couldn't care less about their customers, and put profit above all.
Yes, you are right that is why companies like byju's, cuemath etc uses linguistic chatbots which are less costly as compared to AI chatbots.
In my experience, all chatbots are pretty bad. The AI ones have actually been some of the worst. At least when you are given a set of options to type/choose from you know it will work - there's usually more that can go wrong / chance of misunderstanding with AI ones.
The only use case where chatbots are sometimes useful is to guide people through choices in order to automatically fill a form... but even then, a well designed form based interface would be more appropriate as it is easier to navigate back and forward to fix mistakes, make amendments etc.
This really is one of those cases where the technology is not up to the job, or even appropriate for the job in most cases.
I'd agree with your points (2) and (3) above. Totally disagree on the others
You forgot to mention that they filter out all but the most persistent customers, allowing business owners to pocket money that would otherwise be spent on wages.
The term chatbot is weird in itself. Either the software is actually a bot, i.e. probabilistic rather than deterministic, and that's pretty poor UX when you want an invoice adjusted or know more about pricing, or it's deterministic and then it's just a graphically very, very small web site with a horrible reimplementation of URL:s on top.
If I learned that my employer was trying to replace customer support with fake-chat software I'd start sending my CV to other companies.