- Limited Understanding: AI may struggle to understand the context or nuances of human language. This may lead to misinterpretations of user inputs. This can result in inaccurate or irrelevant responses.
- Lack of Empathy: Chatbots lack the ability to express empathy and understanding. This is crucial in certain situations, especially in customer support or sensitive conversations.
- Dependency on Training Data: AI models powering chatbots heavily depend on the quality and diversity of the training data. Biased or unrepresentative data may lead to biased behaviour or failure to understand certain user groups.
- Complexity of Conversations: Handling complex and multifaceted conversations can be challenging. Some solutions may struggle with tasks that require deep understanding, reasoning, or contextual awareness.
- Security and Privacy Concerns: Dealing with sensitive information is a concern for all organisations. Poorly implemented solutions may risk unauthorized access, data breaches, or mishandling of personal information. We must prioritize security and privacy.
- Integration Challenges: Integrating chatbots into existing systems or workflows can be complex. Ensuring seamless communication and compatibility with other software may require significant development effort. This is, of course, dependent on your requirements, organisation size and what you hope to achieve.
- User Trust and Ethical Concerns: Users may be sceptical about the accuracy and reliability of chatbots. Additionally, their use raises ethical questions, such as transparency, accountability, and bias. It’s important to address these concerns to ensure fair and responsible AI deployment.
- Maintenance and Updates: Ongoing maintenance and updates will keep responses relevant and effective. Neglecting updates can lead to outdated information and decreased performance.
Scripted Chatbots
To mitigate some of these concerns with AI a scripted response implementation may suit your needs better. These types of chatbots are ‘locked down’ to only use predefined hand-written responses. There are advantages and disadvantages to this method but may suit your needs better.
A big disadvantage is the limited responses that have to be manually added. This could result in a lot of unanswered questions whereas AI will always attempt to provide some response. However, the advantage is that the responses are not AI-generated so they will only ever say exactly what you want them to say.
Privacy issues surrounding AI bots are also a concern. Some chatbots can function in a way that no communication occurs with 3rd parties. This keeps all data on the same server as your website. This will mitigate potential data breaches and mishandling of personal information.
Live Chat
Whatever the solution, we often recommend a fallback feature. This then requires manual intervention. In some cases, when the user cannot resolve their request via a chatbot, prompting a user to fill out a contact form, emailing, or phoning may suffice. However, using a live chat feature can sometimes be much more beneficial. It can pick up right where the chatbot failed to resolve an issue or answer a question. This will decrease customer service response times and create a more seamless process for the user.
Overall these features can help automate a lot of customer care issues. In some cases, we can implement automated processes that deal with common tasks. For example, allowing customers to check out, book tickets, initiate a returns process, submit feedback, and much more.
