Survey finds most automated bots only smart enough for quick, simple queries
Pegasystems announced survey results from 3,500 global consumers that find most chatbots still aren’t smart enough to meet their high expectations. While most agree chatbots can be fast and convenient in certain situations, consumers cite a lack of intelligence as their top complaint against automated bots, and 65 percent still prefer a human agent on the other end of the chat.
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 percent) rank their chatbot experiences as merely ‘adequate’ – doing some tasks well and others poorly. Another 18 percent grumble how chatbots are ineffective or even annoying. Only 16 percent 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 percent 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.”
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 percent), Lack of context in the conversation (24 percent) and Robot-like engagement with few human qualities (14 percent).
Similarly, the top reasons consumers would drop a chatbot session are when bots can’t answer their questions (47 percent selected), make them do more work than expected (47 percent) or are too vague in how they can assist them (43 percent). Separately, only 17 percent said they would use a bot to purchase goods and services, further muddying the path from bots to direct revenue.
A full 45 percent of these consumers without chatbot experience said they won’t try one in the next year while another 30 percent aren’t sure, which presents a roadblock to companies trying to expand reliance on digital service channels. Only 25 percent 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 percent), lack confidence in chatbot effectiveness (31 percent), or worry about security and privacy (27 percent).
“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 results of our global 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.”
