Chatbots – A Challenge?

According to Gartner’s Market Guide only 4% of global enterprises have adopted the technology of chatbots whereas 38% is planning deploy them. Hence, chatbot technology has rampant growth in its demand. In our previous blog chatbots we have seen some important information on this technology. Now its time to see the challenges faced by this maturing technology.

Customer experience is a driving force in the success of an organization. Hence, it is essential that organizations must heavily invest on hoe could they improve in providing excellent services to customers. Even though we have said it a promising technology, it comes with certain challenges in mimicking human interactions.

First of all, majority chatbots are unable to provide proper acknowledgement. Since chatbots work on certain pre-defined or documented scripts, it is unable to provide any queries out of context or something that is not addressed in the script.

Secondly, most of the chatbots wait for the user to navigate the decision tree. Users couldn’t say anything regarding the previous step or cannot change the indent in middle of a conversation. Since, chatbots performs based on decision trees that once proceeded, cannot be reversed. It is not flexible.

Thirdly, chatbot are incapable of ambiguous statements. Ambiguity is a characteristic of human interactions. Chatbots gets confused when asked an ambiguous question.

Finally, it doesn’t have a long-term memory. Lack of memory is another drawback of chatbots. They can’t recollect information that was provided even before a short span of time.

Addressing the challenges addressed above could create a breakthrough in creating chatbots that is capable of providing excellent customer experiences. And in turn would help in boosting the growth of our business.

In short, an efficient chatbot must be flexible in their interaction and intends and ‘build once deploy to many’ technology. Moreover, it must be able to recognise the emotional state of the user.

Reference:

The Challenges & Opportunities Presented by Chatbots. (n.d.). Progress Kinvey Chat.