9 Common Chatbot Mistakes That Are Making You Lose Customers

1. 9 Common Chatbot Mistakes That Are Making You Lose Customers This goes without saying — when you start using a chatbot, knowingly or unknowingly, you make the common chatbot mistakes! If you don’t believe this, quickly rethink the reason why you’re reading this “Chatbot Mistakes” article! Makes sense, right? Chatbots have become the revolutionary game-changer for businesses and customer service agents today! Since its first introduction in 1966, chatbots have come a long way. Today we are at a phase where the transition is happening from chatbots to AI chatbots, a more advanced chatbot using artificial intelligence. Chatbots generation — you name it, a chatbot can be put in place to take care of the job. are being used for all purposes — customer support, sales inquiry, lead

2. So, we assume that you’re already using a chatbot or you’re about to use one. You want to know the common chatbot mistakes beforehand to save you from all the trouble! Great! Because a lot of businesses think just because they have a chatbot in place, it’s all set! It actually isn’t! You’ve got to make sure that your chatbot really works and one part of that is identifying/preventing the common chatbot mistakes! No one wants to end up as an iconic chatbot fail example! So, let’s get started with it! Chatbot Mistakes You Should Avoid Making 1. A Chatbot Without a Purpose and Tone First things first! Ask yourself what your chatbot is going to do once you deploy it on your website! Some might want their chatbot to handle customer service. While some want to look after marketing activities like lead generation. Similarly, you should decide what the purpose of your chatbot is and make sure it sticks to it! When your chatbot is vague and offers irrelevant information, the user experience gets hit and you start to lose customers eventually! And the second thing — the tone of your bot! The tone your bot uses represents the tone of your brand. Make sure you take a solid approach on this — whether your chatbot is going to be formal, or friendly, or maintain a neutral tone. This can have a great impact on your customers. Over a period of time, they decide whether to stick with your brand or not! Today’s chatbots are so advanced that you can create one for your business in no time. If you’re quite new to chatbots, you should consider going with SimplyBot, one of the best AI chatbots around! The team takes care of the end-to-end customization and gives you a ready to deploy chatbot for your website — no matter what your business needs are! 2. Don’t Make Your Users Work Too Hard Chatbots are so popular because they are fast, instantaneous and most of the time offer good customer support!

3. In fact, there’s been a 92% increase in usage of chatbots since the year 2019. And chatbots have been able to handle 68.9% of conversations from start to finish in the same year. That’s probably because the chatbot had a clear purpose and didn’t make customers work too hard! Here’s an even clear explanation — never let your customer think hard of what he/she should do next. The assistance journey should be seamless, smooth and customers should be able to sort things out on their own unless and until a human intervention is needed! Simply said, your user shouldn’t have a feeling like this! To fix this, make sure you always, ● Make the next step clear — Make use of instant replies and buttons to make the journey easy for the customer. Make sure there’s always a way for them to interact further and there’s no dead end in the conversation until the issue gets resolved. Give clear instructions for first-time users — You never know when some customer who is completely new to chatbots might land on your website. You need to help them by giving them even clear instructions. For example, if a user is supposed to type in the query, consider putting that out as a message! This way, the journey is smooth and they don’t have to get frustrated! ●

4. ● Give links to FAQs and Articles — It’s always good to come up with links to relevant FAQs, articles, and even landing pages if necessary. This helps the user get what they need on a self-serve approach without having to wait for a support agent. This chatbot from Crelio Health is a perfect example of this! Following the above steps will help your users enjoy a smooth chatbot conversation experience! That’s the whole point, right? 3. Let Users Know They Are Speaking With a Chatbot Most businesses shy away from telling the user that the conversation is happening with a chatbot! It’s because they are unsure how the user might feel about this and don’t want the user experience to get sabotaged! “A recent study by Drift revealed that an approximate 87% of consumers in 2021 have had positive or neutral experiences with chatbots!” Users don’t hesitate to talk to a chatbot as long as they know it’s a chatbot. Because when they think the conversation is with a human, they expect the best responses and solutions.

5. But when it comes to chatbots, they cut some slack! Your customers understand that a chatbot can do only so much! It’s best when your chatbot greets your customer and introduces itself to avoid any sort of misunderstanding! Plumhq does this great! They clearly tell the user that their conversation is with a chatbot! Even though it doesn’t state that it is a bot in the message, the user can figure it out by just looking at it! 4. Not Having a Name or Personality Is Another Common Chatbot Mistake Since we were talking about the chatbot greeting your customers, wouldn’t it be kind of weird when your chatbot doesn’t have a name or personality to it? That said, most businesses today make sure that their chatbot has a name! The reason, it brings the customers a step closer to them. Also, chatbots with names are easy to remember and give a human-human conversation feeling — user experience nailed! To help you understand better, why do you think conversational AI chatbots like Siri or Alexa are so popular? It’s because they have a name and a personality!

6. Here are a couple of names for your bot — April, Ela, Abby and Anna. Looking for more name suggestions for your chatbot? This read has 400+ super cool chatbot names! 5. Your Chatbot Sounds “Too Robotic” Yes. We do get the point that it’s chatbots we are talking about. But if your chatbot sounds too robotic, it isn’t going to work! When you start creating canned responses, make sure there’s warmth and empathy in the messages! Straight brutal answers with no empathy or humor can make the interaction lifeless and boring. The point is even though customers are interacting with chatbots, they shouldn’t feel that way! For example, there’s a difference between the monotonous “Welcome” and “Hi, How May I Help You Today?” You get the idea, right? AI chatbots do a great job here! They use Natural Language Processing and sentiment analysis to detect the context of the message and deliver more human-like responses! 6. Not Routing Support Tickets to Customer Service Agents at the Right Time Remember where we were saying that chatbots can only do so much! So, what happens then? There’s probably a point when your chatbot comes across a query where it does not have canned responses or the workflow design to solve it. In such scenarios, your customers shouldn’t be left in the hang waiting for responses or assistance! Your chatbot should be able to escalate the issue to the right customer service agent. Seamless bot to human transfer is one of the features of Simplybot that makes it one of the best AI chatbots around! You can customize your chatbot to escalate issues to the right person based on their role. And this is what 86% of users believe according to Consumer Experience Index. 7. Test. Test. Test. Not to Fail Test your chatbot enough times before you deploy it! Remember, a chatbot can make or break a website, let alone the entire business (for this to happen, it has to be disastrous though)! And It’s important that you don’t make this chatbot deployment mistake!

7. Put your bot through a sequence of tests (both good and bad) to avoid scenarios that could disrupt the user experience and your brand reputation. Like we already said, you don’t want to end up as an example for chatbot fails, do you? Speaking of chatbot failures, when Microsoft introduced its artificial intelligent chatbot named Tay on Twitter, it took less than 16 hours for the chatbot to go from “Humans are Supercool” to “chill I'm a nice person! I just hate everybody”. Microsoft eventually had to shut down the chatbot immediately! Image Source: Hacker News You can know more about it here! That’s what happens when you don’t do enough testing! But luckily, today’s bots are so advanced and you don’t have to worry about such scenarios. It’s just that you need to test it adequately before you make it live. 8. Constantly Monitor and Make Changes Accordingly This is one of the most common chatbot mistakes companies make. When they deploy a chatbot, they think it’s all set and turn their backs on the bot! They go into a “set and forget mode” which is totally not good! There’s no way you can think about all kinds of scenarios and come up with canned responses for the same initially! Constant monitoring can help you understand how you can make your chatbot deliver better customer service and identify any kinds of errors or bugs during the development phase! 9. Not Using An AI Chatbot Is a Big Chatbot Mistake We’re down to the last chatbot mistake on our list! Yes. Like the title says, not using an AI chatbot is another mistake that you don’t want to make!

8. Chatbots are efficient — no doubt about it! But AI chatbots take the experience to a whole new level! They use Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning, and Sentiment Analysis to understand the context & intent of the message to deliver better responses. AI chatbots also learn constantly with the inputs they get and at a point, they start handling queries for which they aren’t trained as well — no interference needed! You can save all the time and effort by concentrating on more complex tasks that need your attention! The Bottom Line So, yes! We’ve come across the most common chatbot mistakes that can cost you your customers. Apart from this, there are also a few things you should look into like keeping your chatbot messages short, the bot is extra pushing your user to take some action, offering more options than needed, and more. Chatbots are known to cut down 30% costs when it comes to customer support. But it only works when you do it right! Avoiding the most common chatbot mistakes will not only make the customer experience better but will also give your business the space to grow. And the best chatbots are known to do it with ease! But the most important of all, make sure you use AI chatbots for your business — the difference it can make is phenomenal! That said, start working on it! You never know when a small chatbot mistake can make you lose potential customers!