How to Avoid Common Customer Support Chatbot Pitfalls?

By Aayushi | Last Updated on September 6th, 2024 6:33 am

Businesses nowadays are competing to meet customer expectations in the best possible way to stay ahead in the market. Customers expect not only high quality products and services from them but also a flawless customer support experience which has led most companies to shift from traditional customer service methods to chatbot technology to serve their customers without any risk of human error.

However, even chatbots have certain common pitfalls and it takes only a single mistake to make or break a good customer experience. The silver lining is that these chatbot pitfalls can be easily avoided. But how? Let's find out.

Create Your Own Chatbot

What is a Customer Support Chatbot?

A customer support chatbot is an AI-powered computer program designed to engage in human-like conversations with customers to resolve their inquiries, provide them with 24/7 chat assistance and deliver an exceptional customer experience.

Customer support chatbots use the power of emotional intelligence and natural language processing to understand, analyze and respond to customer queries with accuracy. They can understand user intent and access their knowledge base to cater to customer needs and remove roadblocks faced by them by providing them reasonable solutions in no time!

If built properly and trained well using software like Appy Pie's Chatbot Builder, customer support chatbots can make work so much easier for businesses. The only thing to know is how to avoid common chatbot pitfalls and not let those affect customer experience.

7 Common Chatbot Pitfalls in Customer Support: How to Avoid Them?

A customer support chatbot can have certain mistakes either in its structure or working due to which it might not be able to deliver the right experience and achieve expected results. Here are 7 common chatbot pitfalls that businesses should be aware of to avoid them effectively:

Your Chatbot Provides Inaccurate and Biased Responses

Response accuracy is one of the main features that makes a chatbot desirable for customer service. If your chatbot does not provide accurate responses i.e responses that are contextually relevant to the customers' query, then the whole point of having them is rendered useless. Moreover, if the bot's responses are biased towards a particular target group's opinions and needs, it can prove to be less effective for others and have a limited scope.

The only way to improve the accuracy of your chatbot's responses is to train and test it well on a comprehensive and diverse dataset. Continuously updating the chatbot's knowledge base can help it stay up-to-date with recent trends in customer behaviors and preferences and generate accurate and unbiased responses which provide value to all users. Thus, to avoid the mistake of response inaccuracy, you should focus on training the chatbot and regularly testing it with different prompts.

Your Chatbot's Personality is Missing

Who wants to talk to a boring robot? Not customers, at least. If your chatbot is a simple tool with no name and a boring personality, customers wouldn't want to chat with it to get their queries answered and you won't receive clicks on the bot's widget, let alone using it for provision of customer support.

The solution to this pitfall is simple. Focus on chatbot designing and tailor its look and feel according to your customers' interests to make the bot appeal to them. Software such as Appy Pie's Chatbot Builder allow you to customize the bot's elements like widget avatar, background, color, header and footer etc. along with the option to keep a suitable name for it. Moreover, the bot's message flow and conversational style can also be edited as per choice.

Also Read: A Complete Guide to Personable Chatbots

There is No Option for an Exit

If your chatbot doesn't provide an option for exiting the conversation or transferring it to some other channel to move forward, users can feel trapped and frustrated and might leave your website or uninstall the application causing loss of a potential or existing customer.

This mistake needs to be avoided at any cost as losing a customer is extremely detrimental to a company's growth. To do that, make sure to provide clear options for users to exit the conversation any time. This could include texts or buttons saying 'Exit','End Chat' or the option for a handoff to live chat to continue the conversation and seek assistance from a human agent.

Your Chatbot Doesn't Personalize Conversations

While conversing with a chatbot, if it keeps generating generic responses to the users' messages, the interactions can feel very impersonal and less effective. Users may not be as engaged in the conversation as they would be if the bot's conversational tone is friendly and personalized.

To equip the bot with the ability to personalize messages, train it to collect users' information like their name and interests, and incorporate those in its messages when talking to them. Using past interactions to tailor responses based on user preferences and implementing natural language processing to understand user intent can also help to a great extent.

Your Chatbot's Goals are Not Clear

It's possible that your chatbot lacks clarity in its purpose. There are multiple chatbot use cases like lead generation, customer retention, customer support etc. and figuring out the goal which you are targeting by deploying the chatbot is the first and most important step. If the bot doesn't have a defined goal, it would not be able to provide valuable solutions to users and the conversation would keep circling.

The way to clearly assign a goal to your chatbot is by determining gaps in your marketing, sales or promotional processes, and then designing and training the right type of chatbot to work towards filling these gaps. With a clear purpose, say, customer support in this case, your chatbot would be able to provide seamless chat assistance to your customers, without leaving them hanging and providing irrelevant responses.

Chatbot's Response Time is Too Long

One of the important reasons to deploy a chatbot on your website or application is its ability to generate fast responses. If that's not the case with your chatbot, you might have to rethink your strategy. Slow responses lead to increased customer wait time and eventually customer frustration.

Optimizing the chatbot's performance can help improve the chatbot's response generation speed.This can involve streamlining backend processes, using efficient coding practices and ensuring that the chatbot can handle high volumes of messages.

Again, regular testing of the bot's speed by giving it different prompts and tracking the time taken by it to generate a response can help you address any drawbacks found.

You are Not Making Use of Chatbot Analytics

If a chatbot's performance is not measured regularly, it becomes hard to identify the areas for improvement and the bot continues to provide inefficient customer service. For example, if the chatbot is not able to understand certain complex queries and has a low containment rate, it should at least be equipped to transfer the conversation to a human agent. But if this pitfall isn't identified and improvements aren't made, the quality of customer service is negatively impacted.

To overcome this, making use of chatbot analytics is extremely effective. A robust analytics system can help track user interactions, analyze past conversations and common queries to find out areas where the chatbot struggles. Once the pain points are determined, they can be used to refine the chatbot's performance and regularly update it to enhance its effectiveness.

Conclusion

In conclusion, avoiding common chatbot pitfalls in customer service is crucial to ensure that they serve their intended purpose with full efficiency. Failure to address these pitfalls can reduce the chatbot's efficiency and compromise their value. By facilitating the provision of accurate responses, giving your chatbot a personality, offering clear exits, defining goals, personalizing bot-user interactions, ensuring a fast response time, and using analytics to continuously improve your chatbot's structure and working, businesses can maintain a smooth flow of customer support and highly enhance their customers' experience!

Try Customer Support Chatbot

Aayushi