To avoid chatbot implementation failures, businesses must think through several parameters that may lead to disappointment.
These include deploying a chatbot without a clear strategy or goals, with messages and a “tone of voice” that are not aligned with the brand, with poor conversation design leading to conversational dead ends, that is unable to identify the customer’s use case or is unable to address personalized customer issues, that lacks human handover capability especially when customers prefer human agents, that has no data collection and analysis functions, that lacks personality, fails to understand customer emotion and intent.
These deficiencies lead to poor performance, user dissatisfaction, confusion and frustration among customers, poor customer experience, may also lead to the chatbot providing inappropriate or irrelevant responses and to missing out on valuable insights into customer behavior and preferences.
Here are some examples of chatbot issues:
- Microsoft’s Tay was designed to learn from its interactions with Twitter users. However, within 24 hours of its launch, Tay began posting racist and sexist tweets, leading to its shutdown.
- Poncho was a weather chatbot that was launched in 2013. However, Poncho failed to consider all the possible scenarios it could encounter, leading to a chatbot fail scenario.
- Erica was Bank of America’s chatbot designed to help customers with banking activities. However, Erica failed to understand customer queries and provided irrelevant responses.
Source:
(1) Chatbot Customer Experience Failures (And How To Avoid Them). https://www.coredna.com/blogs/chatbot-fail
(2) 5 Typical Chatbot Fails + Prevention Tips – Userlike Live Chat. https://www.userlike.com/en/blog/chatbot-fails
(3) https://simplify360.com/blog/chatbot-fails/
(5) https://bing.com/search?q=chatbot+failures+examples.
(6) 9 Epic Chatbot/Conversational Bot Failures (2023 Update) – AIMultiple. https://research.aimultiple.com/chatbot-fail/
(7) Top 10 Chatbot Fails and How to Avoid Them – Comm100. https://www.comm100.com/blog/top-10-chatbot-fails-and-how-to-avoid-them.html