• Survey finds most automated bots only smart enough for quick, simple queries
Pegasystems Inc., the software company empowering customer engagement at the world’s leading enterprises, today announced survey results from 3,500 global consumers that find most chat bots still aren’t smart enough to meet their high expectations. While most agree chat bots can be fast and convenient in certain situations, consumers cite a lack of intelligence as their top complaint against automated bots, and 65 percent still prefer a human agent on the other end of the chat.
Seventy-two percent of consumers generally find chat bots to be helpful to some degree, but the interaction quality can be quite mixed. The majority (58 percent) rank their chat bot experiences as merely ‘adequate’ – doing some tasks well and others poorly. Another 18 percent grumble how chat bots are ineffective or even annoying. Only 16 percent gave their chat bot experience a high quality rating.
Analysts expect chat bot usage to rise significantly in the next two years – a shift that could prove costly for brands that don’t evolve their bots.According to Gartner, “25 percent of customer service and support operations will integrate virtual customer assistant (VCA) or chat bot technology across engagement channels by 2020, up from less than two percent in 2017.”
Best bots keep it simple :
Consumers tend to favor chat bots for only the simplest queries that can be done quickly. The most popular chat bot use cases are :
- Tracking an order (60 percent selected)
- Finding basic information (53 percent)
- Asking basic questions (49 percent)
The respondents also noted that fast service (56 percent), ability to engage on their own schedule (37 percent), and convenience (36 percent) are chat bots’ top benefits. When done well, 43 percent say chat bots can be almost as good as interacting with a human, while 34 percent disagree, and 23 percent don’t know.
Artificial intelligence or artificial stupidity?
However, speed and simplicity can only take today’s digital consumers so far. While most brands claim artificial intelligence power their bots, consumers’ top chat bot complaints include:
- Not enough smarts to effectively answer questions (27 percent)
- Lack of context in the conversation (24 percent)
- Robot-like engagement with few human qualities (14 percent)
Similarly, the top reasons consumers would drop a chat bot session are when bots can’t answer their questions (47 percent selected), make them do more work than expected (47 percent) or are too vague in how they can assist them (43 percent). Separately, only 17 percent said they would use a bot to purchase goods and services, further muddying the path from bots to direct revenue.
In no mood for chit chat
The survey found a separate group that have yet to try chat bots at all and have no plans to start anytime soon. These bot holdouts, which skew towards a slightly older demographic, say they haven’t used chat bots yet due to:
- Lack of any real exposure to chat bots (53 percent)
- A personal preference to only engage with a human (30 percent)
- Lack of knowledge on how to use chat bots (23 percent)
A full 45 percent of these consumers without chat bot experience said they won’t try one in the next year while another 30 percent aren’t sure, which presents a roadblock to companies trying to expand reliance on digital service channels. Only 25 percent of these non-users said they would be willing to experiment with a chat bot, albeit with some reluctance. Their biggest concerns stem from their lack of experience: they simply don’t know how to use chat bots (top concern at 46 percent), lack confidence in chat bot effectiveness (31 percent), or worry about security and privacy (27 percent).
Pega surveyed 3,500 consumers across the US, Canada, the UK, France, Germany, and Australia for this study.
Download the eBook, The Chat bot Revolution, at : www.pega.com/chatbot-revolution to find more survey results and to learn tips on improving customer service through better chatbots.
“As chatbots become more pervasive, the quality of the engagement has lagged significantly behind customer expectations,” said Ying Chen, head of product marketing, platform technologies, Pegasystems. “To truly depend on digital channels as the first line of defense in customer service, smart businesses need to unite their chat bots with the enterprise systems that can do real work – not just fetch bits of random information. At the same time, they must apply advanced artificial intelligence to deliver true personalized interactions in real time. The results of our global survey show that businesses still have a long way to go before consumers feel they can trust chat bots to give them an exceptional experience that can set a company apart.”
