Chatbot has gained immense popularity in the technology industry. In layman terms, chatbots are basically the programs that are able to handle conversations with people. Initially, chatbots were created for entertainment purposes, but then they evolved into assistant-level software. Applications like Skype, Facebook Messenger, Slack, Telegram, etc widely use chatbots to cover multiple user needs. Google Assistant and Alexa from Amazon have proven that this technology is not only popular but also demanding, hence it needs to be improved.
However, chatbots are very far from perfect and there are many issues faced during chatbot development. Let’s talk here about the major ones along with some tips on how to eliminate them:
Problem #1 — Conversations with chatbots are poor
Chatbots are not that good at keeping up a conversation. Their pre-established number of answers and reactions is limited. Let's take a booking bot for example. You surely get the basic questions answered and the simplest suggestions pushed, but if you go into detail, you most probably will need to make a research by yourself.
Solution:
Create a chatbot service with built-in AI. Such an intelligent chatbot learns from all the collected interactions and improves over time. These kinds of intelligent chatbots support more diverse conversations and can even at times crack jokes in the right context. What's more? A survey found that 77.14% of the people are comfortable chatting with an AI bot.
Problem #2 — You don't always need a chatbot
Following the problem number 1, there is one more to mention. Sometimes you just want to talk to a real person instead of a robot. Depending on what type of help you need from a chatbot service, sometimes it just can't cover all your needs. For example, consider you want to buy clothes online, so you ask the chatbot to filter results according to your shopping requirements. However, there are times like queries related to size, when chatbots fail to give correct answers. There are numerous cases like this when you realize talking to a real person could solve any of your issues much faster.
Solution:
There's little you can do to make people use only chatbots. Once conversations with machines are sophisticated enough to cover all user needs, this problem will be diminished. Make your chatbot smart.
Problem #3 — Chatbots are not worth the pain
Chatbots are usually free. They are not good enough to pay for them but on the other hand, developers lack the motivation to improve them if there's not much of a need. In a real sense, not much depends on chatbot technology. With thousands of them created since their appearance on messaging platforms, it seems like the same number of frameworks appeared too. Now all you need to create a chatbot is — software that has numerous templates and plugins for chatbot development. There are numerous guides and how-to’s adding to that. It's bad news for those who develop great chatbots that break the stereotype of them being dumb and try to monetize their product.
Solution:
Don't count on chatbot technology as the main monetizing source. It won't bring you lots of money even if they are the most helpful and sophisticated digital companions. Chatbots are mainly an additional business solution to make your service even more pleasant to the user.
Problem #4 — Chatbots overcomplicate everything
You might disagree but there is a chance you don’t need this chatbot at all. For example, you want to order a pizza online, and it can be done for 2 minutes right in the app by filling in a form with 3 fields: your phone number, email, and address. Now, imagine this app has a chatbot that is supposed to make the task easier for you. So you are full of hope to order pizza even faster than you used to do before but it turns out this chatbot technology is not as intelligent as you expected, and it only can help you with the order in 10 steps. There are numerous similar cases when companies make chatbots because it’s a big trend, but don’t invest much in the whole business and turns out everything works just fine even without them.
Solution:
Consider all the pros and cons before chatbot development. Figure out whether it really solves the problem or not. Remember that chatbot has to be a handy tool, not a tricky rebus.
Problem #5 — Poor chatbot maintenance
So you have decided that you really need chatbot technology for your business as almost every business including your competitors is using it. You hire an offshore dedicated team and they create a chatbot. After you implement it, you see how people started using it, and you suppose everything is fine now. Then, you forget about your chatbot at all and focus on other business tasks. Some users start complaining that something doesn’t work but you just don’t have time to fix that. Moreover, you don’t want to invest in hiring a proper support team, so you just let it go. This leads to fewer and fewer people using the chatbot, hence its purpose to is questionable.
Solution:
If you have decided to implement technology to achieve some goal, make it the main focus not only till it’s done, but also after the release. Establish continuous working support and maintenance for your chatbot solution. Don’t forget about regular updates and improvements.
Chatbots are the Future
Chatbots are not as bad as they are told of. They can be really useful and great entertainers. With tremendous improvements in the last 2-3 years in natural language processing technologies', we can only expect chatbots becoming our savvy everyday cronies.
Many multinational top mobile app development companies have already jumped the chatbot train and are providing excellent native chatbot development services for Android & iOS apps to clients.
