
Chatbots Don't Deliver Good Customer Service - rcymerys
https://latenightcoding.co/chatbots-customer-service/
======
thanatropism
Siri is not _essential_. Every time it fails to deliver a feature of my phone,
I can thumb my way to it in seconds. So it's actually fun whenever it works.

Also: because it's not _essential_ , one gets to adjust to its failures.
There's a broad range of queries for which I know Siri will just say "this is
what I found online for..."; I tend to just open the browser and use Google's
autocomplete instead.

So... I have a problem when the chatbot is trying to perform an _essential_
service, like getting a technician to come to my home because cable internet
is not working. Imagine medical triage done by chatbots, jesus christ.

An MTV chatbot that tries to do interactive music recommendation? This could
work. Spotify's algo is already very good, but you can't refine "yeah, I
wanted something more like X, but a little like Y. And not X exactly" \-- just
"give me more like X including lots of X".

And nobody gets hurt by a bad song recommendation.

~~~
michaelbuckbee
That's my feeling of Siri usage as well, that it's not reliable enough to just
sort of take for granted.

But, what's really interesting to me is that Alexa has surpassed that level
(at least in my household). So that for routine things, it's not a novelty to
use it, but an actual improvement.

This is still obviously for non-essential services like music, games, weather,
etc. but it's also reliable enough to handle things like turning on/off lights
in awkward spots.

~~~
rhino369
Alexa isn't really a chat bot. You issue commands to her. She does an amazing
job at it. Seriously, the voice recognition is truly great. But you are still
issuing a command.

You've just learned the language she speaks.

------
computator
> _When you 're filling a signup form, you instantly know what information
> they'll need from you. You can decide if you're comfortable sharing them
> before you engage in filling it._

If only that were true! The trend is to ask for a little bit info at a time,
then take you to the next page where it asks for other info, and so on. You
don't see at a glance the whole form anymore.

I resort to filling in fake info on sign-up forms, order pages, employment
applications, airline/hotel reservations, etc., just to find out what
questions they'll ask so I can decide whether to refuse before I tell them
anything.

And also to find out key information they tell you only at the end (sales tax,
shipping cost, etc.).

~~~
shangxiao
Along similar lines, I detest a trend I've noticed where login forms show the
username/email & password on separate forms. It's annoying to have to click
through more than is necessary and additionally breaks my password manager's
auto login.

~~~
thanatropism
Tumblr has done this for how long?

Worse yet, they have very similar (except for color) buttons for "Log in" and
"Sign up". Often if you have bad internet and the last layer of the page
hasn't loaded yet, you don't know which button to press.

------
varelse
I suspect what's great about assistants like Siri, Alexa, and even Google Now
is less that they have voice interfaces and more that they have well-funded
support teams behind them to deliver exponentially more efficient routing of
queries into appropriate knowledge-bases based on the best of contemporary
research driven by their respective corporate thinktanks.

Compare and contrast with data mining the logs of call centers into RNNs and
hoping for the best. A fun exercise here is to take one's SMS logs and do the
same. In my experience, one will achieve an amazing Max Headroomization of
one's cliches and trademark expressions, but little else.

When confronted with a voice menu system, I used to scream "OPERATOR!
OPERATOR! OPERATOR!" at the top of my lungs and bang on the 0 key repeatedly
until I got connected to a human. Recently, I've noticed they hang up on this
behavior and even force one to wait through the entire braindead list of
choices before allowing pro-users to bypass all the inanity because, after
all, one must "listen carefully as our options have changed!"

~~~
JadeNB
> Recently, I've noticed they hang up on this behavior

I've definitely had them ignore any sensible operator prompts, but actually
hanging up? That's a step beyond. Care to name and shame any offenders?

(I've always enjoyed the claim, and once or twice believe I've observed the
behaviour—though I am sceptical—that a lot of these systems scan for
obscenity, and route to an agent. When I get a robocall while I'm out walking
(phone for audiobooks), I always curse at it for a while, just in case. Even
though it almost never gets an agent, it's a good stress reliever!)

~~~
michaelmrose
I've worked phone support for a major cell carrier. Among the things I was
told there by a manager.

\- That people that spam zero should be hung up.

\- We could do a fake accent if we could maintain it through the whole call.

\- After they had deleted the feature for support to activate your new device
as a cost saving measure we were to point users to the proper procedure to do
it themselves on the web and tell them that feature was broken despite the
fact that leads could still do this.

\- To make up fake things we had in common to establish a relationship with
the customer so they would give us better surveys.

Customer service is not their strong point.

~~~
JadeNB
That sounds terrible, but I'm confused by this one:

> \- After they had deleted the feature for support to activate your new
> device as a cost saving measure we were to point users to the proper
> procedure to do it themselves on the web and tell them that feature was
> broken despite the fact that leads could still do this.

Does it mean that you were told to give instructions that you knew wouldn't
work, or 'just' that you were told to direct users to the hard way of doing
something even though there was an easier way of doing it?

~~~
michaelmrose
We were told to tell to customers that the feature was broken and that they
had to do it themselves rather than pass it to team leads who in fact could do
it in order to encourage users to do it themselves. Meanwhile we were
providing support for the segment of customers the company considered most
valuable. Most were paying $100-$250 a month.

------
api
Chatbots, home IoT, and to some extent VR all strike me as things Silicon
Valley wants to be "the next big thing" but are not and likely will not be
because few people want them.

I absolutely despise chat and voice for any kind of trivial task. I want a UI.
Chat and chat bots are annoying. Voice in any form if infuriating. Having to
actually _call a number_ on the phone for any reason always sends me into a
minor little rage. "Oh, you have to f'ing _call_ for it... sigh." Why would I
want more of this kind of experience? Maybe a few people do but I can't see it
being a Big Thing(tm).

I really do not want an Internet-connected fridge, stove, light switch, or
microwave. When I buy such things I look for non-IoT-encrusted versions since
those are going to be more reliable and are not going to be conscripted into a
botnet or spy on me. IoT features in these kinds of products deliver nothing
of value to me. I also really do not want DRMed food. That includes newer
Keurigs. There is a healthy vintage Keurig market on eBay for a reason.

VR still seems like a fad or a niche product for certain subsets of gamers.
There's some market for it but it's no "E-Commerce," "Social," or "Mobile."

It's sort of funny to see the SV investment culture producing so many
solutions in search of problems after hearing that same culture lecture
against this practice for decades. "Do the market research first!" "MVP MVP!"
etc. They're not following their own advice.

------
freehunter
I run a Facebook page, and they've recently started pushing chats through
Messenger every time you post something asking you to spend money to boost the
post. Every single time. And if you do boost, they'll beg you to boost again
through Messenger. I tried "stop", I tried "cancel", I tried "unsubscribe",
and I even tried cursing at it to see if it would stop. It didn't. Eventually
I had to go into Messenger settings and block Facebook's chatbot. I reported
it as spam, since there's no way to make it stop bothering you.

And now I see they're automatically opening Messenger when you visit someone's
page to get you to message that business for... I'm not exactly sure what
reason.

------
Rjevski
The issue with customer service is that a lot of companies end up with awful
CS because 1) they outsource it to braindead monkeys who hate their job and
are paid pennies and 2) there is no way for someone to complete their task
without talking to CS (no documentation, etc).

So instead of pouring endless money into chatbots, allow people to do whatever
they wanted without involving CS. Provide good, up to date and easy to find
documentation and a web interface if the task needs data entry (porting your
number, changing your billing details, etc). This will reduce the load on your
CS which means you can now bring this back in-house and no longer rely on an
outsourced disgruntled workforce.

------
swiley
If you can spend the time to write good documentation for your product then
you don't need a chatbot, just good search and good formatting.

If you can't be bothered to write good documentation then you won't be
bothered to feed useful information into the chatbot, which is way more clumsy
than a searchable manual anyway.

~~~
gozur88
A great many people won't read your documentation and will become "stuck"
until they have a person explain things. If they're customers you pretty much
have to tolerate it unless you're willing to lose them as customers.

------
ejo3
I use probably about 15 cloud SASS products for my company. Over the past year
many of them have switched from offering either live chat or email support to
chat bots. Often they will send out a marketing email pitching it as a huge
improvement in support. My experience with chat bot support ranges from
frustrating to infuriating, especially when I need help with something
business critical.

~~~
Pigo
I'm not sure what the right adjective is to describe how it makes me feel when
I encounter one, especially if it's with a company that we're doing serious
business with. Disrespectful? Condescending? I think belittling works, because
it definitely gives you the impression that you're concern is trivial. Now
that they have your money they just need to placate you with as little effort
as possible.

~~~
ryandrake
I mean, the same is true for phone bots, and companies have been using them as
tech support for decades. At least with phone bots, however, there is usually
an incantation (often involving pressing zero repeatedly) that can get you to
a live human.

------
ronack
These are pretty well-worn arguments against chatbots. There's an overuse of
bots for tasks that do not benefit from a conversational interface (checking
the weather, surveys, promotions, etc.). But if you stop thinking of bots as
sentient beings and instead treat them as domain-specific command line
interfaces, you may get more utility out of them. For instance, it's possible
just typing/saying "Send me a pizza with sausage and black olives" is the most
efficient way to order a pizza.

~~~
jkaptur
I think that the pizza analogy is really useful. We've had intelligent voice-
capable agents for pizza ordering for ages: calling the store. People hate it!
They want a specialized UI for ordering pizza.

~~~
mercer
Chat API's usually offer inline keyboards and regular custom keyboards. At
least in Telegram you can even replace inline keyboards based on interactions,
meaning you could trivially construct a pretty elaborate UI specifically for
stuff like ordering pizza's.

And even better, the pizza joint can update the conversation with status
updates, special deals if you so desire, and you automatically have a history
of previous orders that you could simply repeat at a later time.

A chat bot strikes me as the _perfect_ UI for these types of things, and at
this point, with Messenger, Messages, and Telegram supporting all this, a
large number of your users already have 'your' app installed!

~~~
jkaptur
Right, I think that WeChat basically exemplifies this too. But at that point,
is the user really interacting with a "bot", or is the chat platform just an
app delivery mechanism like an OS or a web browser?

I'm honestly asking, and I think the pizza example is really illuminating -
how DO people order somewhat-customizable food via these platforms?

~~~
mercer
> Right, I think that WeChat basically exemplifies this too. But at that
> point, is the user really interacting with a "bot", or is the chat platform
> just an app delivery mechanism like an OS or a web browser?

I'm assuming the latter. I mostly avoided WeChat as an example because i
haven't used it myself. But from what I understand WeChat goes much further
than just chat interfaces, which kind of is out of the scope of what I'm
really interested in for now (but still curious about).

EDIT: I'd add that many of the advantages that come with using chat-apps as a
platform are still there even in apps that don't offer all of what WeChat
does.

------
pavlov
Chatbots offer a state-of-the-art user experience brought through a timewarp
from the text adventure games of 1981.

"You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike. There is a CUSTOMER
SERVICE REPRESENTATIVE on the ground."

~~~
ysavir
Maybe you're on to something. Perhaps chatbots would be easier to work with if
we were able to examine inventory and see a list of available commands?

~~~
ucarion
It's considered good style to support user messages like "what can I say?" or
"where was I?" for precisely this reason.

~~~
Pica_soO
You are standing in front of a white house.

------
deegles
I develop Alexa skills and I agree with the article. Another point that is
missing is that the technology hasn't "closed the loop". We have great ASR and
NLU available, but responses still need to be built by hand or templated. This
is the major reason bots feel so unnatural. I think there's a lot of
opportunity for robust Natural Language Generation solutions to help build
voice apps and chat bots that can operate more flexibly.

Also, there's a need for a more declarative, high level programming language
to describe how you can interact with a bot. Defining them as trees or graphs
isn't flexible enough. I've had promising results from experimenting with
concepts from Ceptre ([https://github.com/chrisamaphone/interactive-
lp](https://github.com/chrisamaphone/interactive-lp)). Fortunately there are a
lot of startups experimenting in this space, I think we'll see the most
effective practices replicated quickly.

~~~
mannykannot
In my experience, the major reason bots feel unnatural is that they quickly
reveal their lack of actual understanding of anything, with the mean time to
Turing-test failure being not much longer than the preliminaries (such as
getting your account #.)

Actually, maybe 'unnatural' is not the quite right word, as I have had some
human customer service that is no better in this regard (or perhaps they were
actually some of the better chatbots?)

------
jaclaz
Going a little sideways it's not like at _any_ Call Center you usually get to
talk (without having first gone through all their standard "script" and
possibly become upset and manage to escalate to a higher level of support)
with someone that actually can provide you with assistance beyond what is
already on the FAQ of the correspondent site.

(provided the site FAQ's are actually frequently asked questions and not - as
often happens - a bunch of questions that the original website developer
jolted down because he/she imagined they will be asked and that noone actually
updates with "real" questions asked by customers).

So you get to talk with a human, but very often this human is either clueless
or cannot really do anything about the issue at hand. (not of course fault of
the human, but rather of the way he/she was mis-trained or because of
directives coming from the company)

~~~
rm_-rf_slash
Just ask for their supervisor.

~~~
jaclaz
Yep, that is:

>manage to escalate to a higher level of support

It's not that easy on many support Call Centers in my experience, not before
having gone through the checklist with a number of unuseful suggestions
(already tried because listed in FAQ).

------
sebslomski
Chatbots are extremely hard. Many of us are jumping on the bot wagon and
leverage AI with NLP & intent recognition. But they miss the important bit:
It's all about the conversation itself. "If content creation isn't right, the
conversation won't delight" (Adrian Zumbrunnen) The technical aspect behind
chat bots is only the tip of the iceberg. We need Conversation Experience
Designers instead of AI Engineers & UI Designers. Many chatbots start with
questions like "how can I help you? Type something". What should I as a
customer expect from the bot? When I visit a website, it's pretty soon clear
how it works and what to expect. This doesn't apply to bots.

------
DustinOfDenver
Great article! I have been working on my own Chatbot solution based on IBM's
Watson (supposedly cutting edge tech)... it is cumbersome... it cannot do
something simple like extract a full address from a conversation (I think
cities are still in beta)... The good news, there is a definite opportunity
for some start up. AI is all the rage and for solving a specific problem with
clearly defined parameters (or if you have a team of a few 100 people working
on it) it is getting pretty good. But interacting with a human is many
things... "defined" is not one of them.

------
romanovcode
Wow, what a surprise. I'm only glad that some of them (for example Microsoft)
allows you to request a human.

First thing to type when you get a chatbot support is "I would like to speak
with human". That usually works.

------
danieltillett
Does anyone know of a single good chatbot? Every single one I have had the
misfortune to interact with has been the best advertisement for their owner's
competitors that I know of.

------
olavgg
Chatbots do work, those who say it doesn't work have just tried the really bad
ones.

Examples of chatbots that do work

Nuance's Nina
[https://www.windstream.com/Support/](https://www.windstream.com/Support/)

Jenn (unknown who is behind it)
[https://www.alaskaair.com/](https://www.alaskaair.com/)

Our James [https://master.boost.ai/](https://master.boost.ai/)

~~~
d--b
James: Hi!

James: My name is James and I can help you with bank and insurance questions.
Write to me in either Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, Finnish or English.

Me: Hey, I am French, and am living half in the US and half in France, do I
need to purchase insurance in the US?

James: We offer a full range of insurances to meet all your needs.

James: Select an option: Cars other vehicles Home insurance Travel insurance
Health insurance File insurance claim

~~~
statusgraph
I get the same response when I ask "does my insurance work outside of new york
state". It doesn't seem any more intelligent than finding keywords.

~~~
olavgg
Currently our intents match banking and insurance questions related to the
nordic market. This type of question needs training data that is specific to
the US region. There is no problem supporting it technically, it is just lack
of training data.

~~~
d--b
That's not the point. The UI is not appropriate. It makes me feel like I can
ask this type of question, where in fact it cannot.

I'm sure that if I asked the same question replacing France and US by Norway
and Sweden, I'd get the same answer.

~~~
olavgg
You right about that, you ask a difficult question that a even human could not
answer correctly as it isn't precise enough.

All I actually do know from that question is that it is related to insurance
cover abroad. But do you mean car insurance? Travel insurance? Health
insurance? As we do not have an intent for "unknown insurance cover abroad"
yet, we fail to help you further. This happen sometimes for many contexts, but
we work hard to improve this. We do cover this kind of questions very well
when people have login issues, as this is the most common inquiry we have in
production. It can be a range of problems from token issues, cell phone
issues, technical issues on the website or that the account is simply blocked.
But we often manage to help people find the final solution without involving a
human.

My point is, we can solve this today, we just need more training data.
Chatbots are not perfect, but with more training data they will become better,
and be a highly praised service. Finding information using natural language is
the future. I'm confident that we will solve most of the edge case inquires
soon.

~~~
d--b
Yeah right. I think everybody's answer to that is: I'll believe it when I see
it.

Pass the Turing test and maybe, just maybe a chat bit interface will make
sense

------
throwaway2016a
Yet. Chat bots don't deliver good customer service yet.

They will get better and eventually get better than humans. It's a new use of
technology, give it time to improve.

I already know of companies using AI to adapt to customers like this article
says chat bots don't do. It's cutting edge but it is out there.

~~~
michaelt
Maybe. But in that time the early adopters' reputations will be in the gutter
because chatbots are the worst customer support out there.

~~~
epicide
I don't think it's a high risk for their reputation, though. Compared to other
forms of support, it is still better.

I'd rather talk to a chatbot than:

\- the same (or worse) bot over a phone

\- someone who only vaguely speaks my language

\- nothing/nobody at all

\- someone who speaks my language but spends 10 minutes and 30 "thank you"s to
tell me they can't accomplish what I need

The only form that wins out is a living person who is well-trained and speaks
my language well. Most companies already won't provide that.

~~~
michaelt
Personally, if a company can't provide support where you speak to a human, I'd
prefer that they be honest about that - rather than having my hopes raised
then dashed and my time wasted by a chat/phone/e-mail contact that doesn't go
to a human.

~~~
tyingq
I worked on some IVR implementations some time ago. Quite a few would
interpret and understand swearing, and route you to a human via a priority
call queue. Similar for multiple button presses of the zero key.

------
mercer
So, in contrast to the article I personally feel excited about the potential
of chatbots - especially as custom and user-friendly CLI's/UI's more than as
AI-driven 'human' interfaces, at least for now - in a way I've not felt
excited about anything in a long while (both from a business and ideological
perspective, but I care more about the latter, all things considered).

I'd just like to ask that if anyone is seriously pursuing chatbots, beyond
just helping businesses or consultants sell the 'next big thing', I'd really,
_really_ love to talk. My email address is on my profile page.

------
pmontra
I agree with the conclusion. Voice input instead of text and better
understanding and language generation would help.

However the current status is not so grim. In a different application domain,
a customer of mine uses a chatbot to collect leads of credit requests. Their
very basic chatbot converts much better than their form. The difference is so
big that it pays for the extra work to manually extract data from those
conversations that went to the end but we can't automatically get all the
information from (funnily formatted dates, addresses, etc)

------
gidim
Yep chatbots sucks. The trick for good customer support is to enhance a human
agent with AI and not trying to replace it. Suggesting answers to the agent
and automatically replying when the confidence is very high.

------
vkou
To the surprise of nobody who has ever gone through automated telephone system
hell. Whenever I bump into one, I impulsively shout 'zero' 'zero' 'fucking
operator' into the phone.

~~~
cdubzzz
I usually just jam the zero key. Most of the time it works.

Have you ever used one that emits "typing" sounds in to the phone? AT&T
started doing this some time ago on their small business wireless support
line. I jam zero until it says, "Ok, enter the number you are calling about",
I enter it, and it says, "Ok, let me look that up for you", then _keyboard
taping sound_... I can't even describe my reaction the first time I heard it.
So, so stupid.

------
danjc
Zork. In 1980. An example of a text interface that worked better then 99% of
chat bots today. Chat is not a bolt on, it's a product in its own right.

------
dyeje
Funny to read these comments when not so many months ago chatbots and
conversational UI were all the rage.

~~~
freehunter
It still is "all the rage" for a lot of companies who have invested a lot of
money to push this UI. What you're seeing here is backlash from people who are
forced to use it and found it lacking. The only people who like it are
businesses who paid for it and want to force people to use it.

------
mmartinson
I've been spending a good part of a last year working on a chatbot with a very
domain-specific scope, with that goal of arriving a product that delivers a
modest but effective user experience. It's hard and it takes an unbelievable
amount of work to handle myriad of edge cases you get into when a human on the
other end tries to treat your bot like a real albeit limited interlocutor in
the conversation.

The real problem I see is that the last decade of user experience improvements
that work well on the web don't really translate into a chat, as an industry
we're hopelessly bereft of best practices at this point, and our users notice
this and experience it as the frustration of having no idea what to expect
from a bot. The title article and comments cite a lot of good examples.

NLP and other applications of machine learning will make bots better at
delivering correct answers, but making bots feel not-horrible around the edges
is about user experience design. Here are some suggestions that have helped me
a lot.

* Design for failure first

Just like mobile-first design gets the brain out of the pattern of tacking on
mobile interactions as second class citizens, failure-first design focuses on
the primary experience the users have of your bot, it not working. Don't
delude yourself into thinking that your NLP intent parsing is going to result
in more hits than misses down your happy path to user delight. A human will
always sidestep your intended flow by accident, and that human will form
judgements about your product based on it's ability to gracefully recover.
Luckily the bar is incredibly low here.

* Be careful with conversational niceties and over-humanization of tone

It's easy to think that friendly banter and emojis can help personify a bot
and smooth over the above-mention failure paths, but the novelty of these wear
off quickly for a user, and the user is likely to experience more frustration
if the conversational tone doesn't match their frustration. It is also
extremely easy to end of in the uncanny valley when using friendly
conservational copy in the bot messages. Repetition of a robotic message feels
benign-if-annoying, but repetition of a cute emoji-laden phrase can feel very
off-putting.

* Fall back to being a CLI with visibility and helpers

If you've ever been stuck working with a bot, you know that all you want is to
know what it can do, and how you can get it to do that thing. If you notice
the user is in a failure state through keyword matching or repeated failed
routing attempts, fall back to a high-visibility list of actions. Having
quick-action buttons can make this even smoother.

* Train the user on consistent hooks and keywords.

When speaking in a human conversation, utterances of 'stop' or 'wait' are
almost always respected as context-independent keywords that escape or pause
the context of the conversation. If I asked you what you wanted for dinner,
and you responded 'stop', I wouldn't try to figure out what kind of food that
was. In my project, 'help' 'quit' and 'back' are all respected as keywords,
and every context of the conversation implements callbacks to respond in
context to each of these.

* Ask a lot of questions that are easy to answer

Handling raw language is super hard. Routing language into a finite set of
options is a lot easier, plus humans feel listened to when asked for
clarification or if they have been understood correctly. When taking user
input and routing to an action, ask for yes/no confirmation, and provide
options like "This is totally wrong". Opportunities like this could be great
to collect data about how users are stuck to improve on the experience. It's
also validating for the user to feel like they can specify that they were not
heard correctly.

------
bryanrasmussen
anyone have some statistics/research on how badly chatbots perform in
delivering services?

------
yebsido1
no one can seriously like chatbots

------
KirinDave
This article is... weird. It basically assumes the Facebook pseudo-menu-driven
chatbots people fat-finger into their systems with almost no consideration for
UX are the state of the art.

It then compares it to a personal agent that actually has a similar model and
the _worst_ voice recognition and search precision of the current crop agent
software which... isn't even really the same kind of software?

What is this article even trying to say? Poorly written bots are bad, well-
written agents are good, and voice interfaces aren't as bad as people make
them out to be?

Cool.

