While it may feel cute to have your customers or yourself talk to a computer, chatbots provide little to no value to many business processes and functions. In our opinion, chatbots are simply annoying and ineffective, and we’ll tell you why you should steer clear.
The question shouldn’t be if we can have a voice conversation with our applications, as we clearly can, but whether we should.
Natural language processing has been around for quite some time, however, only recently has it gotten practical, and yet, it’s still not perfect.
It seems very inefficient to resort to imprecise systems when we have more precise systems available at hand. A chatbot on a website is bound to impress some people while annoying others at the same time. There are definite use-cases for when a chatbot on a website may be ideal, however, your business most likely does not fall into that category.
You’re far better off implementing marketing lists that reward your loyal subscribers and customers with exclusive deals and offers. With marketing opt-in’s implemented on your website (with the help of Atyx’s Web Development or Managed WordPress Solutions), it’s a great idea to implement a ‘Contact Us’ page with a built in contact form users can utilize to send you questions and concerns. Implementing a chatbot on a website is usually equivalent to a Contact form except more annoying, and the users don’t really know that what they’re about to send to the chatbot is going to end up in your email or third-party application anyway.
People often forget that using your keyboard and mouse is still considered talking to your computer, regardless of whether it’s in a fully customized contact form that makes sense for your business or an annoying pop-up that users aren’t familiar with.