To Bot or Not?

Chat Bots are the new “must have” tool for most online businesses – everyone wants to have one. During my interactions with multiple clients in the past one year, almost all expressed a desire to add a Chat Bot to their website. But are Bots beneficial for every business?

Here is a simple analysis to understand it better.

Quick Responses

Pros: Bots never sleep, don’t need breaks nor get emotionally charged up with your customers. They can chat with your customers entire day without a break, and still won’t expect a bonus at the end of the month!

Cons: Bots are fast, but they are not accurate. You can train your Bot to reply to specific queries and identify keywords from the chat, but you cannot train your customers to speak the Bot language! So, a fast reply may turn out to be the worst reply, and maybe a lost customer!

Cost Saviour

When it comes to running costs, Bots are a clear winner. Apart from the implementation cost, you can easily manage the knowledge base feeding your Bot and your running cost becomes very less. Compared to an employee, you won’t have to bother giving any salary hikes, benefits or bonuses to your Bot. It will be like a loyal entity to your business, working without complaining!

One Bot, Multiple Uses

Pros: Unlike having multiple employees working on different departments like sales, marketing, customer support, your Bot can do all the work alone. Just feed all the inter-departmental data into your Bot and see it handle all sorts of customers for you.

Cons: You can make your Bot work on all sorts of queries, but it cannot provide tailor-made expert solutions for specific queries raised by your customers. This may end up frustrating your customers rather then helping conversations from these leads.

Can a Bot help my business?

Adding a Bot can prove very fruitful, especially if your business is linear with simple sales model. Bots can do wonders with the conversions if you can feed your entire business in an “If” and “Then” logic tree. Else, you will end up loosing many leads due to your Bots.

One must also keep the customer demographics in mind when opting for Bots. While Bots have been a success with millennials, they have failed to impress the older generation who still wants short and specific (to the point) replies to their queries.

Conclusion:

While Bots are certainly the need of the day, they still cannot replace your blood and bone workforce. AI is trying to be an answer to this, but that’s still a distant dream and a costly affair to have one that is “good enough”. So, the question shouldn’t be “Can we implement Bots?” but businesses must ask “Is my business and customers ready to accept a Chat Bot?”.