Why Chatbots Are Unsuitable for Client-Side Applications

Introduction

Following the much anticipated commercial release of ChatGPT in November 2022, the rapid pace of AI development made a significant impact on the capabilities of chatbot applications. We all remember, and with little fondness too, the early chatbots that came out. At best they were capable of one-line formulaic responses to the most elementary of questions and were about as suited to interacting with customers as a disgruntled tomcat on the prowl in the early hours!

Generative AI made for a significant improvement, enabling chatbots to have genuine conversational ability for the first time. As the use of natural language processing (NLP) technology made chatbots significantly more useful, and early industry pioneers such as Chatbase made transitioning to a GenAI chatbot relatively inexpensive, their popularity surged.

Now, as we find ourselves a couple of years on from ChatGPT’s arrival, chatbots are rapidly becoming the de facto standard for automated lead generation and customer service. However there’s plenty to suggest that this may not be the preferable outcome from the client perspective. While today’s chatbots have improved out of sight relative to the early solutions, the experience they provide to visitors, prospects and established customers alike still leaves much to be desired. Recent survey data from Forbes reflects this. Their 2023 research discovered that 80% of customers who interacted with a chatbot experienced additional frustration and 72% overall felt that the use of Chatbots for customer service was not worthwhile.

Why chatbot offerings make for dissatisfied customers from the outset

Chatbots provide an impersonal and unfulfilling experience client-side, and here’s the main reason why – even with generative AI they still remain unintuitive.

The learning curve packs a punch

Although they have improved markedly from the earliest implementations, chatbots still come with a learning curve attached. The response from a chatbot and its relevancy to an individual clients’ circumstances remains subject to the quality of the input prompt, no matter how well it is trained, and it’s highly likely the majority of your customers are not expert prompt engineers and nor do they wish to spend hours getting up to speed with prompting methodologies!

Time-to-value is the critical consideration here. In today’s fast-paced digital world, clients are eager to receive top-notch insights from you sooner rather than later so why require them to learn the ins and outs of prompting to obtain answers from bots that actually speak to their particular challenges in an impactful way?

Why transitioning away from chatbots allows for optimized time-to-value

The obvious question then becomes – if chatbots are ill-suited to delivery of value to your clients, which approach is preferable? The answer, replacing your chatbots with an interactive form. Forms have been around for so long they predate chatbots by years; however a modern conversational form with conditional logic is capable of providing a personalised experience from the very first interaction, without the need for any prior understanding of prompting techniques on the lead or client’s behalf.

With innovative no-code solutions such as Productised, user form input is supplied to an AI model which receives instruction and context from your training data, chosen prompt sequences and brand voice; before individualised guidance is presented to prospects or clients which is deliverable in a range of formats, such as blueprints, assessments or guides. This hyperpersonalized customer experience arises when productisation meets personalisation and it provides a level of nuance that chatbots can seldom if ever match.

To illustrate the contrast between the two approaches, imagine you are a creator in the business development space. You have offered a custom branded chatbot to your clients in order to promote improved retention and enhance value provision. However, overall engagement levels have been disappointing. Your clients and prospects appear to regard the chatbot as a transactional tool with limited usefulness in spite of your best efforts to illustrate the value it provides. The bot is most definitely capable of providing valuable business advice, however this only follows extensive prompting, and clients are often wrong-footed by misleading responses caused by AI model hallucinations.

By replacing the chatbot with a solution that produces digital products capable of rendering high-quality dynamic output and using an interactive form as the first port of call, your leads or recently acquired clients can receive a tailored growth strategy based on answers to form questions relating to their business model, challenges and goals. This makes for a compelling exchange of value; without the need for any prompting expertise or a significant time commitment on the client’s behalf.

The Strongest Case for Chatbots: Internal Business Applications

While they provide an impersonal client experience, there’s still a strong case to be made for using chatbots within the inner workings of your business. This is because the limitations of chatbots from the client’s perspective have little relevance in the business environment.

Here’s 5 benefits that result from the strategic use of chatbots within your creator business.

1. Improved productivity: An internal chatbot enhances your overall business productivity by handling those pesky repetitive queries from your employees and automating simple workflows.

2. Ease of training: With solutions such as Chatbase, Botsonic or Fini, training the bot on business-specific data, documentation and workflows is relatively simple.

3. Task streamlining and reduced dependence on SOPs. Many potential use cases exist when it comes to using chatbots for business tasks; from handing of scheduling, meeting reminders and basic AI tasks through to the automation of team onboarding and training. Depending on your approach to running your creator business, you may also find a chatbot to be a worthy replacement for a number of your SOPs, especially those that are less detailed.

4. Centralisation of your knowledge base: A chatbot can function as an extension of your knowledge base, enabling your employees to ask it for brand guidelines, policies and technical support without having to consult multiple documents or reach out to other team members for support.

5. Personalised employee learning and development: There’s plenty of scope for the use of chatbots that recommend personalised training resources for team members based on their role and progress. In this respect, chatbots can become the ideal solution for employees’ self-paced professional development.

Unlike the use of chatbots client-side which risks undermining perceived value and delivering an impersonal experience all around, internal business chatbots have definite value; from process streamlining, through to new employee onboarding and task automation. When the times comes to expand your business as a creator, the use of chatbots internally will help you manage workloads, reduce overhead and free up your human resources for tasks with increased ROI.

In a nutshell..

If your current value offerings are comprised of branded chatbots, prompt packs and reams of SOPs and worksheets, while they may unlock nuanced insights and provide actionable knowledge aplenty, the time-to-value equation is unlikely to be a favorable one. The bottom line is, your clients are on the hunt for the delivery of personalised value at the earliest opportunity and the only way to meet this need at scale is through the strategic application of AI productisation to your client acquisition and retention strategies that effectively complements your traditional offerings.