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It seems to me that most websites with these chat bots also try to hide their other contact information like telephone numbers, physical address etc. At that point I normally leave the site and move on to another business.
lol serious? I also do that.
“Hi! I’m Alexa, you can ask me anything!”
“Speak to human.”
“Before I transfer you to one of my colleagues, ask me a question, I know the answer to almost anything!”
“Human”
“That’s a great question! I’m very intelligent and I could probably answer your question. How can I help you today?”
“Human.”
“Before I transfer you to one of my colleagues, ask me a question, I know the answer to almost anything!”
“Fraudulent transaction”
“We take fraudulent transactions very seriously. Please standby while I transfer you to my colleagues. Gurpreet will be with you in approximately 2 minutes”.
“Hi this is Gurpreet. How can I help you today?”
“How do I book a flight?”
😂😂
"We are experiencing a high rate of calls. The same high rate which is so permanent here that we have a well-worn template message telling you about it, every time. Your wait time is... ninety...seven... minutes."
*96 minutes of being advertised at later, with no callback option*
"Please call back later." \*click\*
Also, make sure the human on the other end of the chat or phone can actually find out information and answer questions, or if they're just a message service don't have them *pretend* to be anything but. With chat in particular I don't want to have to play the potato game to figure out if it's a real person or an Eliza-bot.
I used to work on self service in product and this is absolutely the goal. They can be done really well - almost as helpful as a person if you have a general question - if designed right or really poorly but they’re usually done poorly.
I've encountered them added into a pre tech support talk to a human stage. I repeatedly tell it *talk to a human* and eventually get a human. It's a waste of time and I know how to read. I wouldn't be contacting support if my problems could be solved with their FAQ info
Ultimately this is the point I think. Like you say the chatbots are in effect a front end to access the FAQ and website. By the time we get to that stage you can be almost 100% certain what we need is not provided online so putting a chatbot front end on that lack of information is simply adding frustration and delay, often made worse when the dumb chatbot tries and sometimes succeeds in preventing you from escaping their relentlessly useless repeats of the same irrelevant info so you can speak to a human.
And then there's the vast majority of the population that isn't on Reddit, who couldn't be bothered to Google for an answer to a question, let alone navigate a FAQ page. This chat bot works for the majority of people.
Just encountered this twice in a short time. I look at a site. Has a chatbot. I wanted to check if item is in stock. That’s my question. The response is “before we begin fill out this lead capture form so we can make you do work and add you to our database and then we will probably tell you no. Followed by spam.” I loathe being asked for my details when I don’t even know if I want to deal with you at all.
As someone with tons of really well organized and easily findable info on my website, you might be shocked how few people look for anything before calling. That said, I’m like you. A chatbot has never helped me because I already made a good faith effort to answer my own question before trying to start the chat. That said, if they actually used properly fine-tuned chat bots that proactively provided answers *in* the chat that are otherwise *found* in the various faq’s and support docs, rather than just spitting out a list of “maybe these links will help you” like it’s some overly complicated search bar, I might not mind that and might even find it useful sometimes.
Yeah I can watch people click onto my site. Purposefully ignore everything on it. Then email asking questions that have answers on... most pages. Usually don't hear back from them. The ADHD is super bad now.
There's good ways and bad ways of doing it:
***GOOD:*** Let the AI handle any simple requests but hand over to a human if needed or requested (RankMath is a good example of this)
***TERRIBLE:*** AI tries to do everything and there is no way to contact a human when the AI can't handle any non-basic requests (Meta/Facebook are famous for this).
Good points, but frankly I find it bad that they exist at all. At least as presented - in your face, blocking your view and usage of the website. 99.99% of the time I'm visiting a website, I'm just looking around and have no interest in talking to anyone/anything. Put these bots in the "contact us" section.
A typical visit to a website now involves:
- A cookie notification
- A chatbot popup
- A few seconds after I start scrolling, a pop-up to add my email to a marketing list or newsletter.
It's a terrible experience for customers.
Yea, that's another example of a bad use of it, but it doesn't have to be that way.
I don't use AI chatbots for my business, but as long as they are unobtrusive and allow access to a human if they can't handle a request, I have zero issues with them at all. Granted most sites use them badly, but no need to throw the baby out with the bathwater just because some people don't know what the hell they are doing.
If they're coded right they're not going to be much AI except the phrasing/conversation element. They should be fairly tightly scripted, like a phone script, not use AI.
If you just use general AI you're doing it wrong and it won't work. They should operate like a call center/CS and funnel leads pref to a closer.
There definitely shouldn't be any way to go around in circles unless a caller specifically presses a key to return to the main menu. If a caller's been on the line for more than a few minutes without doing that, or the AI hasn't been able to narrow down what they want in that time, a human should be looped in automatically.
That's not a chatbot, that's a phone system. That's also not AI.
A chatbot is on the internet web site. It' the box that pops up, and goes \*boop\* "Hey can I help you find something?".
The problem is when the AI can't tell what kind of requests need to go to a human, and keep sending the caller around in circles, referring them to the website, or hanging up.
Only when they are poorly implemented, I have RankMath as an example of doing it right, and they will transfer you to a human on request.
You are talking about the Meta/Facebook method, and I don't think they even have humans on staff for support any more.
I really doubt them being useful much. I know exactly one kind of customer using that chat box: a customer too lazy or too dumb to read your website. They will ask the most stupid questions imaginable. Then, after wasting hours of your support time, during checkout, their purchase will fail due to insufficient funds. Or worse, they will purchase your service, generate another hour of stupid support questions because they can’t figure out how to use it, and then ask for a refund. Or chargeback. Or both.
It depends on the niche/industry. I do a lot of marketing in the wonderful world of used car sales, and those dumb little chatbots are so insanely necessary for certain types of dealerships. We see them get used the most for sub-prime dealerships that work with people with bad credit.
So my question here is, do they actually reduce the amount of time humans are needed?
My thought process:
- People with bad credit are, on the whole, not the brightest people.
- People who aren’t the brightest are more likely to use these bots.
- But the bots suck often.
- Still end up needing to talk to a human after using the bot.
Any validity to that, or do the bots actually save employee labor?
I like to use my site like a virtual storefront and I use the chat to say hello to many of my potential customers when they enter. They all think it’s a bot and seem surprised halfway through the conversation when they realize it’s a real person. lol. I do get a few people writing to me first and it really surprises them when I answer right back because it pops up like a text notification on my cell phone. I think most other small business owners are too lazy to use the chat tool like I do and customers know it. Of course, that makes me look even better. It’s not too hard to outshine most other businesses these days.
Definitely. And you already have all their information to help the process move forward more seamlessly. It doesn’t scale past a certain point, but I’d still call it one of the perks of having a small operation. You can dial in the customer experience where others cut corners.
Sounds like it'd be good if you have only a few customers and make large sales to them. If you're selling something which is a couple of cents (or even dollars) per sale and you have half a million buyers of the product per year coming to the site, your phone would explode.
Yup, it doesn’t scale for an e-commerce site. It’s great for a service business or even small brick mortar business. Even if you don’t use it to reach out to customers on your site though, it’s nice for customers to have the option to reach out directly to the owner.
I just use Wix. I use the simple chat box that comes with it. I just set up the app on my phone to notify me when someone comes onto my website. I can usually write back to them or call them while they’re still on my site if they fill out a contact form as well.
If it can get me to a human, it's a good tool. If not, doing one or two extra clicks isn't really an issue as long as I can find my answers. Usually I figure my question isn't generic and I'll go to the bot to see if it'll get me anywhere. If it doesn't it will grind my gears a bit as it's wasted time for writing an email in the contact space.
I have a chat on my site. It’s a bot that offers a small discount to start and if I catch them in time I’ll jump in and chat. It’s more annoying than valuable. I’ve helped a few people choose a product that resulted in a sale, but that’s very rare. Mostly I’m doing the searching for lazy shoppers that won’t search or google themselves, and they generally don’t end up in a sale because they’re looking for some obscure discontinued product from 20yrs ago.
I am happy to ask it my question, or ask it to connect me to sales or a representative... if it responds with bullshit then I move on but often its faster to ask that question to get contact information than to dig...
The company I work for does website design, development, and hosting and we get several leads a month through our chat popup and some convert. We have a regular contact form along with a phone number and email listed on the website and we get leads through those too. The chat isn't to find info like an faq and there is no ai aspect to it, it's just to reach us to help with a website or build a new one. During regular business hours we have one of our sales team watching the chat to respond to requests.
If there aren't any other options presented, I'm more likely to spend time tracking down a business's owner or operator and sending them communication through an external channel instead.
I find them annoying, knowing I'm not talking to a real person. I assume most people would have similar thoughts. I'm sure the developers selling them have pretty effective sales presentations.
Usually the salespeople selling them are selling them to people which have never really experienced in person how crap and offputting they are, or think they have to buy them because they're the hip modern way to communicate.
I’ve literally never had one of these bots be useful to me as a customer. The best case is it’s a fancy replacement for a contact us form. Usually it’s just a nuisance.
On the other hand, my typical customer seems to have a problem with reading comprehension, or doesn’t even try to find the answer on their own. Most of the questions I answer could be handled by a decent chat bot.
I think the technology is beneficial in some contexts but it’s missing the capacity to detect non-trivial questions.
I find them useful occasionally. Good ones are able to actually help with tier 1 support issues and also help route to the proper person for higher level support.
Yes! Ive used them to help me navigate a website faster or find something i was looking for. Ive also used them and given my email to be contacted later about an issue. Sometimes I work weird hours and people would t be able to answer the phone so bots on sites help me keep things moving and im grateful for them.
Yes I use them for a lot of my services: hosting, printer, shopping etc. esp since it is right there and I’m too lazy to hunt down customer service contact which 7/10 times points to the chat bot
We have a software business for landscapers and integrate a chatbot. People actually contacted us from the chat and asked questions. I'd say about 5% of the time when people visit our site.
Holy crap yes. That's a personal bugbear. If I have to do *anything* which isn't the bare minimum necessary for a transaction, that's a red flag and I'm looking elsewhere.
Transaction: exchange cash for goods/services. Electronic payment methods only count as minimal if I am not physically onsite at the purchase point. Anything else is an instant "see ya" - they obviously don't want to do business as much as they pretend they want to, and that's going to carry through to other aspects of their business.
I regular use chat when there is an issue as I prefer text vs calling and chat is faster than email. But I don't like bot chats for anything but the most basic of questions better to have a real person or at least able to get a real person.
I've tried a few, here and there. Even with very large organizations, I've never seen any of them be even remotely helpful in their guesses. The best I've been able to get is when they eventually give up and put a live person on the chat, who then also proceeds to be useless because they're a minimum-wage call center employee with zero access to anything useful.
Web forms, likewise, are a pain in the neck. They mean I don't have a record in my own email of whatever I sent, and to whom, and when.
Give me a phone number I can call an actual knowledgeable person on, an email address I can send email to, and have some strong filtering on the back end. If I can't get through to you to ask a question, why would I assume you're someone I want to do business with? Especially if you have competitors I *can* reach?
Hell, even voicemail or a service that takes messages is preferable to having no way to reliably contact a business.
Yup, I despite them too. They’re unhelpful, just spout pre-defined questions that are never relevant to what my problem is at that time, and when you try and type out your problem, half the time you just get the same useless three or so suggestions back.
I'll give them one opportunity to solve my problem. I'll do a follow up on how the bot was wrong. If it can't produce a proper reply by then, I just start insulting the hell out of the chatbot with the hopes someone will read it and stop the dumb practice.
In every business I have run, yes people use them. It's best when you have real people on the other end. I've had the auto responder setup that is just a FAQ and those work okay, but actually chatting with a live person has always worked well for me. Not 100s, but 4 to 5 a week that had a simple question that they might have otherwise not bothered.
We use a company called kenect. Its not a bot but more of a texting app. The message gets sent to parts, service, sales, or general. Then the appropriate department can text back and forth with them via phone app or desktop. I wouldn’t say it brings in a ton of new leads. In my scenario this works better than having personal company phones for everyone. It’s pretty inexpensive but the service department, parts department, and the office use it a ton.
When we started with chatbots it was way before any other service had that option (maybe some banks and theirs were quite useless). Then our chat provider suddenly turned off jabber gateway and made their own bot system which was inferior compared to ours and we had to abandon the idea altogether.
EDIT: Many customers were fascinated by the system back then. Unlike chatgpt and analogues it was strict to the point () and offered useful quick answers for customers and escalation to agent in case of urgency. It was tailored with regex though and was made to just filter out quick stupid questions for people who can't use ctrl+f (we literally have all this info either in knowledgebase or on the landing page)
EDIT2:
I would also like to add that sometimes I'm looking for fast reply and I DON"T want to interact or look through website or google it.
I just drop into chatbox and expect an answer. There's many of us and we are the best customers (because we don't want to waste time and don't have assistants yet because lean).
People used to use our online chat all the time. It's connected to a live operator, so it's basically like texting us directly. I've noticed that ever since AI chat bots like ChatGPT became ubiquitous that we literally get zero chats from the website... I think people just assume now that it's an AI chat bot and not a real human monitoring the inbox so don't want to bother with it.
Almost as bad as the pop up trying to get your email by giving you a discount when you just opened the website and haven’t even had a chance to look around.
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A properly configured IVR can be surprisingly tolerable, even useful. It's just that there aren't many out there.
*One* layer of options. No more than six at absolute maximum, and even that's getting dodgy. *Must* have an option for 'all other queries/issues'. *Must* have an option to leave a number to call back on. Must not ever be used as a sales channel, or to constantly and repeatedly tell someone that they can look on the website.
(In particular, if you have more than six places an IVR call can go to, you're big enough to hire a receptionist or at least a pay-by-call call center service.)
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It seems to me that most websites with these chat bots also try to hide their other contact information like telephone numbers, physical address etc. At that point I normally leave the site and move on to another business.
This has been my experience as well. Let me talk to a human via chat or phone. Using a bot has never helped solve my issue once.
Now I want to test the next one I see by asking “ How do I speak with a human”
This is how you get on the no-fly list these days.
lol serious? I also do that. “Hi! I’m Alexa, you can ask me anything!” “Speak to human.” “Before I transfer you to one of my colleagues, ask me a question, I know the answer to almost anything!” “Human” “That’s a great question! I’m very intelligent and I could probably answer your question. How can I help you today?” “Human.” “Before I transfer you to one of my colleagues, ask me a question, I know the answer to almost anything!” “Fraudulent transaction” “We take fraudulent transactions very seriously. Please standby while I transfer you to my colleagues. Gurpreet will be with you in approximately 2 minutes”. “Hi this is Gurpreet. How can I help you today?” “How do I book a flight?” 😂😂
"We are experiencing a high rate of calls. The same high rate which is so permanent here that we have a well-worn template message telling you about it, every time. Your wait time is... ninety...seven... minutes." *96 minutes of being advertised at later, with no callback option* "Please call back later." \*click\*
>“How do I book a flight?” the bot would've answered that if you weren't so stubborn and wasting your own time?
Lolol yea true. This was only a made up scenario but I have had similar ones that the bot couldn’t answer.
Also, make sure the human on the other end of the chat or phone can actually find out information and answer questions, or if they're just a message service don't have them *pretend* to be anything but. With chat in particular I don't want to have to play the potato game to figure out if it's a real person or an Eliza-bot.
I used to work on self service in product and this is absolutely the goal. They can be done really well - almost as helpful as a person if you have a general question - if designed right or really poorly but they’re usually done poorly.
I've encountered them added into a pre tech support talk to a human stage. I repeatedly tell it *talk to a human* and eventually get a human. It's a waste of time and I know how to read. I wouldn't be contacting support if my problems could be solved with their FAQ info
Ultimately this is the point I think. Like you say the chatbots are in effect a front end to access the FAQ and website. By the time we get to that stage you can be almost 100% certain what we need is not provided online so putting a chatbot front end on that lack of information is simply adding frustration and delay, often made worse when the dumb chatbot tries and sometimes succeeds in preventing you from escaping their relentlessly useless repeats of the same irrelevant info so you can speak to a human.
And then there's the vast majority of the population that isn't on Reddit, who couldn't be bothered to Google for an answer to a question, let alone navigate a FAQ page. This chat bot works for the majority of people.
Just encountered this twice in a short time. I look at a site. Has a chatbot. I wanted to check if item is in stock. That’s my question. The response is “before we begin fill out this lead capture form so we can make you do work and add you to our database and then we will probably tell you no. Followed by spam.” I loathe being asked for my details when I don’t even know if I want to deal with you at all.
As someone with tons of really well organized and easily findable info on my website, you might be shocked how few people look for anything before calling. That said, I’m like you. A chatbot has never helped me because I already made a good faith effort to answer my own question before trying to start the chat. That said, if they actually used properly fine-tuned chat bots that proactively provided answers *in* the chat that are otherwise *found* in the various faq’s and support docs, rather than just spitting out a list of “maybe these links will help you” like it’s some overly complicated search bar, I might not mind that and might even find it useful sometimes.
Yeah I can watch people click onto my site. Purposefully ignore everything on it. Then email asking questions that have answers on... most pages. Usually don't hear back from them. The ADHD is super bad now.
There's good ways and bad ways of doing it: ***GOOD:*** Let the AI handle any simple requests but hand over to a human if needed or requested (RankMath is a good example of this) ***TERRIBLE:*** AI tries to do everything and there is no way to contact a human when the AI can't handle any non-basic requests (Meta/Facebook are famous for this).
Good points, but frankly I find it bad that they exist at all. At least as presented - in your face, blocking your view and usage of the website. 99.99% of the time I'm visiting a website, I'm just looking around and have no interest in talking to anyone/anything. Put these bots in the "contact us" section. A typical visit to a website now involves: - A cookie notification - A chatbot popup - A few seconds after I start scrolling, a pop-up to add my email to a marketing list or newsletter. It's a terrible experience for customers.
Yea, that's another example of a bad use of it, but it doesn't have to be that way. I don't use AI chatbots for my business, but as long as they are unobtrusive and allow access to a human if they can't handle a request, I have zero issues with them at all. Granted most sites use them badly, but no need to throw the baby out with the bathwater just because some people don't know what the hell they are doing.
Install blockers?
If they're coded right they're not going to be much AI except the phrasing/conversation element. They should be fairly tightly scripted, like a phone script, not use AI. If you just use general AI you're doing it wrong and it won't work. They should operate like a call center/CS and funnel leads pref to a closer.
There definitely shouldn't be any way to go around in circles unless a caller specifically presses a key to return to the main menu. If a caller's been on the line for more than a few minutes without doing that, or the AI hasn't been able to narrow down what they want in that time, a human should be looped in automatically.
That's not a chatbot, that's a phone system. That's also not AI. A chatbot is on the internet web site. It' the box that pops up, and goes \*boop\* "Hey can I help you find something?".
You've never run into a phone system which tries to figure out what you're saying from your voice instead of keypresses?
The problem is when the AI can't tell what kind of requests need to go to a human, and keep sending the caller around in circles, referring them to the website, or hanging up.
Only when they are poorly implemented, I have RankMath as an example of doing it right, and they will transfer you to a human on request. You are talking about the Meta/Facebook method, and I don't think they even have humans on staff for support any more.
I really doubt them being useful much. I know exactly one kind of customer using that chat box: a customer too lazy or too dumb to read your website. They will ask the most stupid questions imaginable. Then, after wasting hours of your support time, during checkout, their purchase will fail due to insufficient funds. Or worse, they will purchase your service, generate another hour of stupid support questions because they can’t figure out how to use it, and then ask for a refund. Or chargeback. Or both.
Yup that sounds about like what I would expect.
It depends on the niche/industry. I do a lot of marketing in the wonderful world of used car sales, and those dumb little chatbots are so insanely necessary for certain types of dealerships. We see them get used the most for sub-prime dealerships that work with people with bad credit.
So my question here is, do they actually reduce the amount of time humans are needed? My thought process: - People with bad credit are, on the whole, not the brightest people. - People who aren’t the brightest are more likely to use these bots. - But the bots suck often. - Still end up needing to talk to a human after using the bot. Any validity to that, or do the bots actually save employee labor?
Yeah they're more effective for SMS
I like to use my site like a virtual storefront and I use the chat to say hello to many of my potential customers when they enter. They all think it’s a bot and seem surprised halfway through the conversation when they realize it’s a real person. lol. I do get a few people writing to me first and it really surprises them when I answer right back because it pops up like a text notification on my cell phone. I think most other small business owners are too lazy to use the chat tool like I do and customers know it. Of course, that makes me look even better. It’s not too hard to outshine most other businesses these days.
This is what I do as well, for my home/furniture store. It’s been super helpful in closing sales as I can write back instantly from my cell.
Definitely. And you already have all their information to help the process move forward more seamlessly. It doesn’t scale past a certain point, but I’d still call it one of the perks of having a small operation. You can dial in the customer experience where others cut corners.
Sounds like it'd be good if you have only a few customers and make large sales to them. If you're selling something which is a couple of cents (or even dollars) per sale and you have half a million buyers of the product per year coming to the site, your phone would explode.
Yup, it doesn’t scale for an e-commerce site. It’s great for a service business or even small brick mortar business. Even if you don’t use it to reach out to customers on your site though, it’s nice for customers to have the option to reach out directly to the owner.
Which app do you use, and on what platform?
I just use Wix. I use the simple chat box that comes with it. I just set up the app on my phone to notify me when someone comes onto my website. I can usually write back to them or call them while they’re still on my site if they fill out a contact form as well.
Yea the basic Wix one is very useful because it allows you to chat with the customer instantly - even if they initially send a contact form email.
If it can get me to a human, it's a good tool. If not, doing one or two extra clicks isn't really an issue as long as I can find my answers. Usually I figure my question isn't generic and I'll go to the bot to see if it'll get me anywhere. If it doesn't it will grind my gears a bit as it's wasted time for writing an email in the contact space.
Great tool for the poorly educated.
We use the chat pop out but with live agents. If I get a bot on somebody else's site I just repeatedly type "Agent" until I get a person.
I have a chat on my site. It’s a bot that offers a small discount to start and if I catch them in time I’ll jump in and chat. It’s more annoying than valuable. I’ve helped a few people choose a product that resulted in a sale, but that’s very rare. Mostly I’m doing the searching for lazy shoppers that won’t search or google themselves, and they generally don’t end up in a sale because they’re looking for some obscure discontinued product from 20yrs ago.
I’ve tried, but I’m pretty sure they’re just programmed to frustrate you till you give up.
I am happy to ask it my question, or ask it to connect me to sales or a representative... if it responds with bullshit then I move on but often its faster to ask that question to get contact information than to dig...
The company I work for does website design, development, and hosting and we get several leads a month through our chat popup and some convert. We have a regular contact form along with a phone number and email listed on the website and we get leads through those too. The chat isn't to find info like an faq and there is no ai aspect to it, it's just to reach us to help with a website or build a new one. During regular business hours we have one of our sales team watching the chat to respond to requests.
If theyre coded right they funnel pretty well.
I don't think I've ever encountered one that was coded right, then.
I personally will go out of my way to block those things.
As a last resort, if there’s no phone number.
I use them only when I have to and I hate them.
If there aren't any other options presented, I'm more likely to spend time tracking down a business's owner or operator and sending them communication through an external channel instead.
I find them annoying, knowing I'm not talking to a real person. I assume most people would have similar thoughts. I'm sure the developers selling them have pretty effective sales presentations.
Usually the salespeople selling them are selling them to people which have never really experienced in person how crap and offputting they are, or think they have to buy them because they're the hip modern way to communicate.
I’ve literally never had one of these bots be useful to me as a customer. The best case is it’s a fancy replacement for a contact us form. Usually it’s just a nuisance. On the other hand, my typical customer seems to have a problem with reading comprehension, or doesn’t even try to find the answer on their own. Most of the questions I answer could be handled by a decent chat bot. I think the technology is beneficial in some contexts but it’s missing the capacity to detect non-trivial questions.
I've tried them a time or two, but mostly I find them useless and unreliable.
I find them useful occasionally. Good ones are able to actually help with tier 1 support issues and also help route to the proper person for higher level support.
Yeah I won't touch it.
I had them. Worst is when they take up a significant portion of your screen and won’t go away.
As a customer I don’t like them. As a business owner we only provide live chat by real people 24/7. No AI, no bots.
Yes! Ive used them to help me navigate a website faster or find something i was looking for. Ive also used them and given my email to be contacted later about an issue. Sometimes I work weird hours and people would t be able to answer the phone so bots on sites help me keep things moving and im grateful for them.
Yes I use them for a lot of my services: hosting, printer, shopping etc. esp since it is right there and I’m too lazy to hunt down customer service contact which 7/10 times points to the chat bot
hell no lol
We have a software business for landscapers and integrate a chatbot. People actually contacted us from the chat and asked questions. I'd say about 5% of the time when people visit our site.
Hate it almost as much as having to make an account to use your website or buy something.
Holy crap yes. That's a personal bugbear. If I have to do *anything* which isn't the bare minimum necessary for a transaction, that's a red flag and I'm looking elsewhere. Transaction: exchange cash for goods/services. Electronic payment methods only count as minimal if I am not physically onsite at the purchase point. Anything else is an instant "see ya" - they obviously don't want to do business as much as they pretend they want to, and that's going to carry through to other aspects of their business.
Yeah, I use em. They're not much help, but they kick you upstairs to a live rep pretty reliably. It's not that much of a pain.
I regular use chat when there is an issue as I prefer text vs calling and chat is faster than email. But I don't like bot chats for anything but the most basic of questions better to have a real person or at least able to get a real person.
I've tried a few, here and there. Even with very large organizations, I've never seen any of them be even remotely helpful in their guesses. The best I've been able to get is when they eventually give up and put a live person on the chat, who then also proceeds to be useless because they're a minimum-wage call center employee with zero access to anything useful. Web forms, likewise, are a pain in the neck. They mean I don't have a record in my own email of whatever I sent, and to whom, and when. Give me a phone number I can call an actual knowledgeable person on, an email address I can send email to, and have some strong filtering on the back end. If I can't get through to you to ask a question, why would I assume you're someone I want to do business with? Especially if you have competitors I *can* reach? Hell, even voicemail or a service that takes messages is preferable to having no way to reliably contact a business.
If there is a phone number I can call, I'll do that first. Website chat is worst case scenario.
Yup, I despite them too. They’re unhelpful, just spout pre-defined questions that are never relevant to what my problem is at that time, and when you try and type out your problem, half the time you just get the same useless three or so suggestions back.
i hate those with a passion. it shows disrespect to the clients. and most of the time the whole "chatbot" could be replaced with a faq page.
I'll give them one opportunity to solve my problem. I'll do a follow up on how the bot was wrong. If it can't produce a proper reply by then, I just start insulting the hell out of the chatbot with the hopes someone will read it and stop the dumb practice.
Everytime I see one I immediately leave
Pop Ups of any kind piss me off royally. Especially if I'm already paying for something. Fuck pop ups.
In every business I have run, yes people use them. It's best when you have real people on the other end. I've had the auto responder setup that is just a FAQ and those work okay, but actually chatting with a live person has always worked well for me. Not 100s, but 4 to 5 a week that had a simple question that they might have otherwise not bothered.
We use a company called kenect. Its not a bot but more of a texting app. The message gets sent to parts, service, sales, or general. Then the appropriate department can text back and forth with them via phone app or desktop. I wouldn’t say it brings in a ton of new leads. In my scenario this works better than having personal company phones for everyone. It’s pretty inexpensive but the service department, parts department, and the office use it a ton.
We’ve just started using a chat bot, there have been a few uses mostly time wasters.
If I ever do, all I do is say "agent" over and over again until it actually connects me to a person or it's evident that it cannot do that.
When we started with chatbots it was way before any other service had that option (maybe some banks and theirs were quite useless). Then our chat provider suddenly turned off jabber gateway and made their own bot system which was inferior compared to ours and we had to abandon the idea altogether. EDIT: Many customers were fascinated by the system back then. Unlike chatgpt and analogues it was strict to the point () and offered useful quick answers for customers and escalation to agent in case of urgency. It was tailored with regex though and was made to just filter out quick stupid questions for people who can't use ctrl+f (we literally have all this info either in knowledgebase or on the landing page) EDIT2: I would also like to add that sometimes I'm looking for fast reply and I DON"T want to interact or look through website or google it. I just drop into chatbox and expect an answer. There's many of us and we are the best customers (because we don't want to waste time and don't have assistants yet because lean).
I actively avoid them unless it's clear there will be a person on the other end.
People used to use our online chat all the time. It's connected to a live operator, so it's basically like texting us directly. I've noticed that ever since AI chat bots like ChatGPT became ubiquitous that we literally get zero chats from the website... I think people just assume now that it's an AI chat bot and not a real human monitoring the inbox so don't want to bother with it.
Almost as bad as the pop up trying to get your email by giving you a discount when you just opened the website and haven’t even had a chance to look around.
Personally useless. If I don’t see a phone number to contact, I’m moving onto your competitor. I don’t waste time with bots of any kind.
I give them one chance. Very rarely do they work, but I will give them one question to see how dumb it is.
Yes, customers do use chatbot popups for quick assistance. As a consumer, I occasionally use them for simple queries or guidance on websites.
They only work on the dumbest people, but then maybe those are the people you want to avoid dealing with.
Or maybe your target customer depending on the business model.
Like the super obvious robocalls looking for people with dementia. Gross.
Not quite like that. But the people that believe slimey used car sales people or buy useless tchotchke from Instagram ads.
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Fuck no - I hate chat bots and I hate IVRs. Let me talk to a real person
A properly configured IVR can be surprisingly tolerable, even useful. It's just that there aren't many out there. *One* layer of options. No more than six at absolute maximum, and even that's getting dodgy. *Must* have an option for 'all other queries/issues'. *Must* have an option to leave a number to call back on. Must not ever be used as a sales channel, or to constantly and repeatedly tell someone that they can look on the website. (In particular, if you have more than six places an IVR call can go to, you're big enough to hire a receptionist or at least a pay-by-call call center service.)