Have you seen The Customer Experience Factbook?

In this 180+ page report, you'll find all the information and support you need to build a profitable, effective CX Improvement Program that spans every part of your business. You'll be able to implement and manage meaningful and profitable change, and grow your bottom line despite a slowing economy.

Get it on Amazon (Kindle/Print)

Consumers say 'chat bots' are too dumb to help much

Convenience is one thing, but intelligence is better

Seventy-two percent of consumers generally find chatbots to be helpful to some degree, but the interaction quality can be quite mixed. The majority (58%) rank their chatbot experiences as merely 'adequate' - doing some tasks well and others poorly. Another 18% grumble how chatbots are ineffective or even annoying. Only 16% gave their chatbot experience a high quality rating.

Analysts expect chatbot usage to rise significantly in the next two years - a shift that could prove costly for brands that don't evolve their bots. According to Gartner, "25% of customer service and support operations will integrate virtual customer assistant (VCA) or chatbot technology across engagement channels by 2020, up from less than two percent in 2017."

"As chatbots become more pervasive, the quality of the engagement has lagged significantly behind customer expectations," said Ying Chen, head of product marketing, platform technologies, Pegasystems. "To truly depend on digital channels as the first line of defense in customer service, smart businesses need to unite their chatbots with the enterprise systems that can do real work - not just fetch bits of random information. At the same time, they must apply advanced artificial intelligence to deliver true personalized interactions in real time."

The best bots keep it simple
The results of the survey show that businesses still have a long way to go before consumers feel they can trust chatbots to give them an exceptional experience that can set a company apart. In fact, consumers tend to favour chatbots for only the simplest queries that can be done quickly. The most popular chatbot use cases are:

1. Tracking an order (60% selected)
2. Finding basic information (53%)
3. Asking basic questions (49%)

The respondents also noted that fast service (56%), ability to engage on their own schedule (37%), and convenience (36%) are chatbots' top benefits. When done well, 43% say chatbots can be almost as good as interacting with a human, while 34% disagree, and 23% don't know.

Artificial intelligence or artificial stupidity?
However, speed and simplicity can only take today's digital consumers so far. While most brands claim artificial intelligence power their bots, consumers' top chatbot complaints include:

• Not enough smarts to effectively answer questions (27%)
• Lack of context in the conversation (24%)
• Robot-like engagement with few human qualities (14%)

Similarly, the top reasons consumers would drop a chatbot session are when bots can't answer their questions (47% selected), make them do more work than expected (47%) or are too vague in how they can assist them (43%). Separately, only 17% said they would use a bot to purchase goods and services, further muddying the path from bots to direct revenue.

I'm in no mood for chit-chat
The survey found a separate group that have yet to try chatbots at all and have no plans to start anytime soon. These bot holdouts, which skew towards a slightly older demographic, say they haven't used chatbots yet due to:

• Lack of any real exposure to chatbots (53%)
• A personal preference to only engage with a human (30%)
• Lack of knowledge on how to use chatbots (23%)

A full 45% of these consumers without chatbot experience said they won't try one in the next year while another 30% aren't sure, which presents a roadblock to companies trying to expand reliance on digital service channels. Only 25% of these non-users said they would be willing to experiment with a chatbot, albeit with some reluctance. Their biggest concerns stem from their lack of experience: they simply don't know how to use chatbots (top concern at 46%), lack confidence in chatbot effectiveness (31%), or worry about security and privacy (27%).

Have you seen The Customer Experience Factbook?

In this 180+ page report, you'll find all the information and support you need to build a profitable, effective CX Improvement Program that spans every part of your business.

You'll be able to implement and manage meaningful and profitable change, and grow your bottom line despite a slowing economy. Grab this goldmine of easily adaptable and up-to-date strategies, walk-throughs, trends, technologies, research, suppliers and partners, plus all the supporting arguments you need to build a solid CX strategy.

While most marketers could list maybe a dozen key points for improving their brand's Customer Experience (CX), the researchers and writers at The Marketing Factbook have identified FORTY main 'CX Keys' which will help you drive your customers to new levels of delight, loyalty, advocacy and profitability.

The areas in which customers have direct contact with your organization are perhaps the most obvious places in which CX improvements can be made, and this report addresses all 24 of these 'Direct CX Keys', applicable to offline and online businesses alike.

At the same time there are many other areas that indirectly affect CX (such as the supply chain, policies and processes) in which every business can make simple but far-reaching improvements. This report guides you through the problems and solutions for all 16 of these 'Indirect CX Keys', many of which are often forgotten or under-played even in the best CX strategies.

Get it on Amazon (Kindle/Print)