Are chatbots completely useless?

Remember a few years ago when all we talk about in marketing was chatbots? They were going to change everything and automate our whole sales process. Then we saw just how bad they were. Is that the end of it?

This is Clickstarter, the Australian Digital Marketing podcast. I’m Dante St James.

The hype over chat bots is definitely over. The sudden rush of sudden experts in chatbot marketing has slowed to a trickle. And all because the promise of chatbots simply didn’t deliver the better customer service, better lead generation and better sales figures we were promised.

So many of us threw it all out and just went back to manually handling all our social media enquiries and website messages. But throwing out the baby with the bathwater isn’t wise when there are actually some great uses of automated messaging that can still make a real difference to your workflow.

A more sensible approach than stopping all chatbot activity would be to:

1.     Use automated responses and chatbots for the simple stuff

2.     Always give the customer a way to skip the chat and go to a real person

3.     Move to more of a hybrid approach that uses the best of both worlds

Let’s dig a bit deeper into all that.

Rather than throwing out all your automations like a Luddite smashing a loom in a factory, use chatbots and automated responses for what they’re really good at.

So what are their strengths?

Automated responses in platforms like Facebook Messenger, Instagram Direct Messages and on website chat support plugins are ideal at:

1.     Welcoming and Reassuring – seeing a chat plugin on a website can really reassure a customer that they’ll be able to get answers to their questions, should something come up. That quick welcome message might get shut down more than 80% of the time when someone lands at the home page, but the psychological effect of it is remarkable. I know when I am shopping, knowing that I can chat to someone or something about my enquiry reduces any anxiety I might have about needing to call someone to get something resolved. Facebook, in a recent study, found that over 64% of us prefer to message for help than call for help. And that number waws across all age groups, not just the famously socially anxious Generation Z.

2.     FAQ – opening hours, pricing, location and all those most frequently asked questions are ideal for chatbots and automated responders in social platforms and websites. That’s because the answers don’t often change, and the questions often represent 80% of the things that people are asking.  This also lends itself to bookings that can be done online. Recently I installed a series of basic autoresponders on a Facebook page for a bar that wanted to take online bookings so that they wouldn’t have to spend so much time on the phone, Messenger of Email to take bookings. They started using a table booking system and then let Facebook Messenger lead people to it. In its first week of operation, it reduced the time spent on taking bookings manually by 90%.

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