When and where exactly does a Chatbot kill an App?
The much talked about, discussed topics in the recent past has been whether Chatbots would take over the Apps and Websites.
I never thought about this particular question till I joined as a Product Manager — AI product in a company that powers micro-conversations. Chatbots seemed to be the new thing, an interesting product and with a very new set of challenges. Upon joining, using and developing Chatbots, understanding the intricacies the product involved, I started dwelling more deeply on the question — why would people prefer to use Chatbots more than apps or web services? An app seems an easy thing to use, and so does a website. Would I prefer writing out what I want than clicking on a few buttons to complete my task?
I write from the perspective of both sides of the product — as a user and a Product Manager.
Before I proceed further to contribute my two cents, I would provide some more background on what I do — we build Chatbots majorly for Financial Institutions — banking, capital markets and insurance domains, and I work with the AI product that powers these conversations.
There are majorly two kinds of bots that we usually interact with. The first kind hides a human behind the scene, who is responsible for understanding and answering you. Needless to say, the conversation sounds more natural, and. understanding better.
The second kind, however, uses an engine behind the scene to answer your questions. The engine could be a rule-based system, or an NLP powered one.
For the purpose of this article, let’s leave aside the human-powered bots.
From. My experience as a bot user, my conversations, more often than not, have gone like this:
Me: Help me do xyz
Bot: Do you want to do abc? Please confirm.
Me: No, I want to do xyz
Bot: Throws a set of FAQ answers, totally unrelated
Or like this,
Me: Help me do xyz
Bot: ok, let me help you <gives a series of forms to fill>
Now, you see from the first example, often the bot has problem understanding the user, provides unrelated answers, and highly likely end up annoying and putting off the user.
However, with the second, the bot throws a set of forms at the user.
This gets me to wonder, how is this any better than opening the app, and filling in the same form? The app would in fact not have problem understanding what I was saying, in fact I do not have to say anything at all.
Why then, bots?
This gets me to ask the questions — why then bots? In what what way are they better than apps? what are bots better at than apps? What is the job they do that an app doesn’t?
Let’s explore the answers.
Here are few answers to what are Chatbots better at:
#1 When apps and sites are complicated, and we need guidance to reach where we want. And yes! when there is a lot that you can do.
A lot of sites, majorly financial institutions have extremely complicated designs. To find how to perform one operation is a challenge. You traverse through and click so many buttons to get a work done. That is, if you know the traversal path.
Another point to consider here is, if you have multiple bank accounts, requesting for a cheque book might involve traversal of service request>request for>cheque book in one of the banks while apply>cheque book for other.
Is there really a need for it to be so complicated? I sometimes have to Google on how to raise complaints on a bank’s site.
A Chatbot here, will be a simpler way of asking — “apply for cheque books” and bam! In one step there it is.
In summary, an interaction which involves a tedious or complicated set of steps is much easier done on a Chatbot than app.
Saying this, a set of operations that you regularly do, like fund transfer, even if it involves multiple clicks of buttons — customers might be impartial to Chatbot or an app.
#2 Chatbot provides more personalised experience
An app has one template, one set of steps and common to all. The max personalisation that is done is add pages to favourite.
From an organisational perspective, if it wants to utilise the massive quantity of data to provide a better experience, more accurate cross selling, the implementation becomes much easier and experience much better on a Chatbot.
A more personalised customer experience would without a doubt result in better customer conversion rates, retention rates and an overall higher ROI.
#3 Conversations become the way of life
As people are switching from calls to messaging, and from remote controls and apps to the comfort and ease of voice controlled personal assistants, times are changing. Amazon Alexa and google assistant are creating a market far and wide for instruction-based operation.
If and when this habit gets embedded deep within the routine of our users, we have no option but to become lazier than we already are.
Instructing our Google Assistant “transfer 50000 to mom” would seem the easiest thing to do, much easier than getting our phones abandoned in a corner of a room, unlocking it, searching and opening an app, logging in, and clicking numerous buttons to make the transfer.
Chatbots in this instance provide the more natural form of operation.
In summary, in all likelihood Chatbots will not replace Apps and websites.
However, in certain scenarios Chatbots will serve the goal better than apps. But with the current pace of advancement in AI, if conversations become more natural and conversations become a part of user’s lifestyle, Chatbots definitely will be one of the best things that happened in tech.
