Organisations are developing a blind spot when it comes to chatbots, voicebots and virtual assistants. Most businesses are measuring chatbot success on containment rates, deflection, response accuracy, and average response times.
A chatbot performing against these metrics is deemed an operational success. But operational success does not mean the chatbot is an experiential success. The human user is calculating the chatbot experience based on different factors: effort, confidence, being understood and supported. Humans need more than just getting a correct answer.
Mind the ‘product gap’
Creating and launching a chatbot with the correct flows, matched intents, active guardrails, and verifiable content ticks all the boxes of a technically proficient chatbot. It will be able to answer questions and respond to queries, however chatbot functionality does not equal client satisfaction.
Chatbot abandonment is happening quietly. Why? Because many chatbots are not optimised for experience, they are optimised for answer delivery. A chatbot can be two things at once: it can be accurate but the experience unsatisfying. Just because a chatbot works doesn’t mean it is helpful.
Users want context, understanding and for the conversation to progress. They don’t want generic answers, a series of clarifying questions or shallow reassurance.
When users feel friction in the conversation, abandonment often follows, and it happens quietly. There are many micro-frictions that can creep into conversations that put users off. From a chatbot explaining something, for example a policy, but not applying it, to a user not trusting the chatbot as there is no transparency or source.
Even a response feeling scripted can cause friction, as will a chatbot that can’t or doesn’t know when to escalate. Whilst these are not chatbot failures, these micro-frictions add up and there is a compounded impact on the customer experience. When the chatbot is no longer being helpful, and the user doesn’t think interacting with it is worth the effort, it has failed. The chatbot experience is poor and the user leaves.
Organisations that do not look beyond chatbot metrics to the chatbot experience risk harming the customer experience. The customer experience becomes a ‘strategic blind spot’ because the technical metrics such as containment and deflection are wrongly pushed as helping the customer, but they are really about business efficiency. The customer measures success entirely differently.
Great chatbots are more than a tool
The usefulness of chatbots, voicebots and virtual assistants exhibit certain behaviours, and thinking about chatbots in terms of behaviours and not features, puts the customer experience front and centre.
Great chatbots can guide users and:
- Not just answer questions but anticipate the next steps and put them into play
- Reduce the stress, minimise mental effort and reduce the number of decisions a user must make
- Tells of its limitations at the earliest point in a conversation
- Is clear and transparent, building user trust
- Take responsibility
When customers experience a lack of forward momentum in a conversation, they will abandon it. The customer experience becomes a frustration.
Abandonment results from flawed organisational thinking and not UX design. When the focus is on organisational metrics and not human metrics, the customer experience will suffer.
Customer experience first strategy
Organisations implementing customer experience first strategies need to ensure the design of their chatbot is based on user needs and not a list of features of what it can do technically. A customer experience first strategy focuses on creating useful, helpful, and empathetic customer interactions, and not solely on automation, containment, and deflection.
Chatbots need to be designed to support customers, solve the customer problems, and have effortless, frictionless interactions with its users.
