The 5 questions you should be asking about your chatbot

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We’ve now seen some examples of live Messenger bots in the wild since their debut at the F8 Conference. Telegram bots have also been around for awhile. Some of us had high hopes for bots being actually useful for businesses, so that we can prove that the hypotheses around conversational commerce at scale is true.

But is it?

Jokes aside, a bot out there is a representation of your brand and business, and it hence needs to take into account of what customers expect of you when they start interacting with it. In some (well-researched) literature, we found that service quality is the difference between perceived service and expected service, which comes from a blend of your brand, past experiences with you, and the customer’s needs.

Let’s take a look at some of the more popular bots now and how they may improve users’ experience by better fulfilling the expectations of users.

Does it do what it says?

Let’s start with the TechCrunch bot on Telegram (one of the more hyped up news delivery bots around.) It tells the user that it can answer questions, but doesn’t seem to understand the same types of questions that it explicitly mentions it knows, i.e. “Who is [x]?”

We know that natural language processing has not fulfilled all the promises that people have made about it yet, but it may be better not to create the expectation that the bot can answer everything that the user throws at it in a Q&A format. Perhaps it’s better to just stick to being a news delivery bot for now.

Does it remember what users need?

It’s very natural for us to want to go back up and click on a button on a menu that we saw several messages earlier. It’s certainly way easier for us to scroll back up and select them, than if we had to type “menu” or “help” all over again to the same options.

However, bots often don’t remember the context in which they are supposed to operate, and become confused when you try to tap on older menu selections.

Is the content clear?

Can it explain why it needs sensitive details?

Should users expect your Messenger presence to be a bot?

What you can do for your bot and customers