5
Too often, customers ask their team to develop an ordering chatbot (#2) and are very surprised when it doesn’t work very well for support (#3).
I did a quick survey and found at least 50 startups trying to write helpdesk bots of various kinds. The vast majority are ordering slot-filling chatbots. It’s a lucrative market, because if you can even turn 10% of helpdesk calls into a chat with a bot, that can mean huge staff cost savings.
Unfortunately, nearly every startup I’ve seen has completely failed to meet their objectives, and customers who are happy with their investments in chatbots are actually quite rare.
Three traps when investing in chatbots
1. Lack of courage with in-house talent
Several startups have lacked the courage to believe in their own developers. There’s a belief that Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, IBM and Google have all the answers, and that if we leverage api.ai or wit.ai or lex or Watson – or whatever they’ve produced this month – that there’s just a simple “helpdesk knowledge and personality” to put on top of it, like icing on a cake.
Fundamentally, this doesn’t work: for very sound commercial reasons the big
players are working on technology for bots that replace web forms and with that bias comes a number of limiting assumptions.
2. Poor data
A lot of startups (and larger companies) believe that if you just scrape enough data from the intranet – analyse every article in Confluence for example – that you will be able to provide exactly the right answer to the user. Others take this further and try to scrape public forums as well.
This doesn’t work because firstly, users often can’t explain their problem very well, so there’s not enough information up front even to understand what the user wants; and secondly... have you actually read what IT people put into their knowledge repositories?
3. Focusing on the small stuff
There are a lot of different things that can go wrong, and a lot of different ways to solve a problem. If you try to make your support chatbot fully autonomous, able to answer anything, you will burn through a lot of cash handling odd little corner cases that may never happen again. There is a long tail to support requests: many requests are requests you’ve never seen before and will never work again.