Not all customer support trends are easy to spot. Just ten years ago, the idea of “customer experience” was simply a way to describe interactions with customers and was overlooked by some in the industry. Now, it represents what top support companies aim to improve and perfect. That said, the term “chatbots” is starting to emerge as a potential game changer in customer support. Picture virtual agents that can address all your customers’ issues and genuinely converse with them—quite amazing! However, we aren’t there yet, and it might take decades for a more advanced version of this technology to become common in customer support.

So what does this mean for chat bots in the current era of customer support? Is the concept of a chat bot overrated as a support method or is there value in the solution? Here are a few things to think about…

  • Chatbots don’t work well with customer support – In simple terms, the current versions of chatbots often operate separately from customer support software. This means that data isn’t shared between the chat and support tools, and if it is, agents have to sort through pre-written chat responses to find customer inquiries. While the technology is advanced and can be useful, it may raise your costs and increase agent stress as they need to switch between different systems to find information to help customers. Equipping your support team with a smart ticket deflection solution that directs tickets to the right agents for quick resolution instead of a bot is often a better choice.
  • Most customer support solutions already have a chat option – This transition between live chat with a real person and a chat bot can still be confusing to customers, especially in the B2B (business-to-business) industry which can lag behind in adopting new technology. Some customers may look to speak to a real person and be frustrated when they find out that they have started a session with a chat bot. These multiple chat options could be unified to give customers a choice for a live person or a bot directly within the chat window, but currently this is not a common solution.
  • Chat bots simply aren’t accurate enough – Even the most sophisticated machine learning boasts only an 85% accuracy rate for chat bot responses and it’s safe to say that many enterprise chat bot solutions are well below that percentage. Imagine if a live agent gave an incorrect response in 15% of their interactions with B2B customers – they probably wouldn’t last very long and you would risk losing a large portion of revenue from unhappy customers. While this percentage may be tolerable in the B2C world where losing a customer or two won’t be a major issue, the same cannot be said in B2B. One customer could be the difference between a company staying afloat or going under, and there’s a reason why many large consumer-focused companies in the telecom and utilities industries still assign specific reps for B2B accounts. Companies add the human element of personalization to these accounts because they are extremely valuable and being wrong even a fraction of the time with automated responses for these customers is unacceptable.

In conclusion, the current state of chat bots in the customer support industry can generally be a hindrance or a redundancy. Some of the data collected by chat bots currently can be collected and organized better by the right customer support software solution. This isn’t to say that chat bot technology is useless – far from it – but as it stands today the more robust chat bot technology isn’t ready for mass usage. So yes, the chat bots that exist today are overrated and B2B companies in particular should exercise caution before investing in the technology. Most of the functionality that exists today within chat bots in the B2B world can be achieved at a more personalized level with the right customer support software.