Is the Cart in Front of the Horse? Chatbots in Support
Thomas Wieberneit
Management Consultant, Technology Analyst, Podcast Host, Startup Advisor
My recent rant on chatbots having the potential to kill user experience got some nice reactions. It brought me into some interesting discussions on support, mobile, the role, strengths and deficiencies of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) and so forth. Most of these discussions dealt with mobile support but also with the question where AI could benefit most. Particularly good one were with Abinash Tripathy, CEO of mobile support platform Helpshift and Srikrishnan Ganesan, founder of Konotor, now hotline.io after being acquired by Freshdesk at the end of 2015.
Both companies have a focus on in-app support, a solution category that basically got introduced by Helpshift, after Abinash identified a lack of good options or delivering support directly to and via mobile phones. One of the premises is that a lot of the technically necessary and relevant information can get collected directly and sent to the service back end transparently. They have some big customers, including Microsoft and a raft of gaming companies, including Zynga and Supercell. He, of course, has an opinion on bots in support, which he recently also expressed on Venturebeat.
Hotline.io has a customer base that is mainly made of transactional companies, which, too, leads to a high message load but also leads to different approaches, as the user context is often about past transactions. This means that regularly not that much information gets sent together with the support request. Sri, too, has a vision on how to incorporate AIs and bots into support.
Hotline.io is offering a browsing style of offering help using a shallow tree with icon-supported categories on top of a search interface as it is also offered by Helpshift. Of course both systems offer direct in-app chat to support, too; here again hotline.io offers context via the categories (called channels), which can be used for entering the chat session. Helpshift is more relying on system context here. What both companies are doing with this is to establish a focus and to initiate meaningful first reactions.
Why do I talk about this here and now? Because both companies, as well as others, are looking into adding bots into their infrastructures.
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8 年API.ai is another great platform to built out retrieval based chat agents - I've used them quite a bit. I wonder how soon we will see a framework that will allow us to build generative bots in a similar fashion.