> E.g. add a bot that will instantly reply to frequently asked questions to decrease the load of your customer support team. And when the bot doesn't understand requests, don't make it say "sorry I don't understand", just leave the question and a human will reply later (and maybe send a message with expected timeframe for human response).
Why not just present your users with your FAQ and a search box prior to them chatting with an agent? If most customers write in to support on questions that they would've found answers to via an FAQ, wouldn't that work? You don't need a bot for that, and it's just more load on a customer to try and understand the interface to the bot.
I think bots are going to be big in customer support or in conversations between a customer and a business, but I feel like a lot of bots are being built to try and replace the human connection between customer and the business, which I think is the wrong approach.
> Why not just present your users with your FAQ and a search box prior to them chatting with an agent?
Because e.g. the user asked the question on Facebook Messenger. And you don't want to send them to your website when you can reply instantly, right there.
> You don't need a bot for that, and it's just more load on a customer to try and understand the interface to the bot.
I'm actually advocating for bots with no interface, no IRC-like commands. The customer sends the question via chat. If the bot understands it replies instantly, if not a support person replies. Simple. No "type X for whatever" or "sorry I didn't understand your request".
> I feel like a lot of bots are being built to try and replace the human connection between customer and the business, which I think is the wrong approach.
> Because e.g. the user asked the question on Facebook Messenger. And you don't want to send them to your website when you can reply instantly, right there.
You're defending the use of a bot for a scenario that only occurs because the bot exists.
No, please read the full thread. The scenario is the following:
There are currently hundreds of thousands of Facebook pages which receive dozens of customer support questions every day via Messenger.
My point is that a bot can be used reply instantly to frequently asked questions and leave more sophisticated questions to humans. I'm not defending any fancy use of bots. Just simple use cases like this.
One experience I had with a bank that was hard in the past was querying specific account information, specifically routing numbers. Either search would tell me where to look on a check (great let me go find those) or give a generic FAQ. A chat interface can provide that without having weird navigation to boot. To be fair the bank did fix that search recently so it shows me my actual routing numbers now.
Also I just spent 50 minutes in chat with either a bot (or possibly human named Anil) with Comcast trying to sort out a billing issue. Spent 20 minutes trying to point out the lines in the bill I was disputing though I got the credit but I'm not sure if they actually knew why they were giving it. I'm not sure if it would have been faster to call by phone (usually not) but I thought I'd try the chat interface. I wonder if a good bot might be able to figure out context and get a human involved and give them relevant context faster and sped that interaction up.
Why not just present your users with your FAQ and a search box prior to them chatting with an agent? If most customers write in to support on questions that they would've found answers to via an FAQ, wouldn't that work? You don't need a bot for that, and it's just more load on a customer to try and understand the interface to the bot.
I think bots are going to be big in customer support or in conversations between a customer and a business, but I feel like a lot of bots are being built to try and replace the human connection between customer and the business, which I think is the wrong approach.