I absolutely despise those pop-up "Can I help you" boxes on product websites (usually Intercom). It completely disrupts my flow as a reader in trying to understand the product.
That attention disruption got so bad I blocked Intercom and their ilk via injected CSS rules.
I really want to take it a step further and write a plug in to interface a chat bot with the human on the other end and waste their time so sites begin to learn to stop using that BS.
The only ones I really despise are the ones that pop open as soon as you open the page - I haven't even read the damned page title yet, so no, I would not like to ask any questions or tell you anything about my requirements! Just.. go away!
Actually, the ones I really despise with a burning passion are the ones like above, but which follow you around the whole site like some kind of demented Clippy 2.0 - you close the popup and navigate to another page and... BAM! It's back, again!
I thought like you in the past. I only installed the Crisp chatbox (with no popup) on my SaaS and was very surprised with the results: I got more contact from users through it than through Email or Telegram. I got a lot of feedback and was able to help many potential customers.
As developers who never need help, we tend to forget that some people might do, and that a Chatbox that annoys us can help them.
In (weak) defense of Intercom, it's nice when used correctly. For instance, if we're experiencing a service outage, we can send a notice to all active users with that service enabled. But there are limited use cases where it's valuable, and it is heavily abused.
The real-life equivalent of this is one of the main reasons why I prefer to shop online (except for groceries). It's just not possible to study the products without a "Can I help you?" salesperson popping up next to you after a minute.
> I absolutely despise those pop-up "Can I help you" boxes on product websites
Agree. Over the last few years, I started running into those more and more often as well. From an UX standpoint I would categorize them somewhere between marque/blink tags and rotating GIF icons.
Actually, that was roughly the time from which I recall first running into those things on corporate websites (IIRC Yello Strom in Germany had one in the early 2000s, widely know for a particular Easter egg).
I find it kind of funny that those are having a revival in recent years, along with animated GIFs (abused as a video format this time round) and annoying overuse of the word "cyber".
I think part of the problem is that you are not the target audience of the chatbot. For the past year, I've run Intercom on a small saas app (https://www.delayforreddit.com) and I get great feedback from end-users. They love to be able to reach out to me on any page rather than hunting for a support email.
A large component of the problem is that many sites overuse Intercom and don't realize how it impacts their end user experience.
It'd be interesting to just have it connect two chat boxes to each other, and inject just enough randomised text to each of them first to get them to start talking past each other.
I agree that most of the time its just an annoying popup to close. But (and this was more of a thing a few years ago) when I actually want to ask someone a quick question or get a quick ballpark estimate. But They've mostly all been replaced with robots or are just a disguised contact us form for you to say what you want then enter your email.
Funny how the end result of all that Chatbot hype from 2017-2018 kinda just became these shitty Intercom boxes. My insurance company used an inapp chatbot around that time and I setup my account with it, that was a good experience but it didn't seem like a form would have been much different.
I hate them too, specially the annoying ones with a sound and an animation, but they seem to work. At least in the last company I worked it was the main way for customers to contact CS and support.
They are the internet equivalent of the retail store clerk coming up to you to ask if they can help you. No. Go away. I'm here for a transaction, not a relationship.
This site breaks other rules too. Zooming out doesn’t make the font smaller, but makes the column narrower while keeping the font the same size, reducing the amount of text per line (the opposite of what I wanted).
Yes, a lot of people tend to move the mouse down the screen as they're reading. Having the pointer highlighted and then turn into a cursor and keep following your pointer is extremely distracting. I really don't understand what the appeal is.
Looks like it's trying to emulate how the cursor works on iPadOS. I can appreciate the experiment, and I think the execution here is quite good (doesn't feel sluggish at all to me). However, I agree that this just isn't something websites should do.
On an iPad, the site shows it's own context sensitive cursor below the iPadOS cursor, for extra weirdness.
I'm not sure why it took so long for people to recognize this. An overwhelming majority of chatbots I've used are utter rubbish and are better served through a regular interface (search, directory listing, etc).
Everyone dreads call menus / phone trees - chatbots are largely the same except there are easier & better UX alternatives in an online medium.
Because customers want to talk to a person, and executives don't want to pay for that person. Enter a slick salesman with a bogus "AI-based machine-learning customer service automation" spiel, and bob's your uncle
I had to call UPS because of a wrong delivery state a few weeks ago. I ended about in their automated phone system where you don‘t anymore press numbers but rather say what you would like. There‘s never an option to talk to a human.
I ended up googling and found out a secret keyword to talk to an agent who one can directly say after choosing a language. I never have been connected faster to a human when calling a large companys hotline.
I feel like most of us were wise to the fact that this was a terrible idea on day one. It was funny to watch MBAs try to cash in on the "next big thing" in tech, though.
The problem with chatbots is one of an unfulfilled promise, an unrealistic setting of user expectations. An empty Google search window doesn't pretend to be a human being -- although it is actually very powerful. Clippy, on the other hand, has a human face and pretends to be an intelligent agent, only to fail. So chatbots, when seeming to act like a human via natural language, are held in the user's mind to a higher standard. Siri, in my iPhone, seems to strike a better balance. It takes my spoken input and gives replies (albeit not great replies). But I never get the feeling that it is trying to carry on an extended conversation with me.
I am an engineer at a profitable chatbot company (HelloTars).
I can't entirely agree with the points mentioned in this article.
Yes, a chatbot is not ready to replace human support.
However, there are other areas where they show good results.
We have been helping customers with lead generation chatbots for the last four years.
What we have learnt is customers would instead engage with a chatbot than filling up lengthy forms. Because chatbot nudges users to give information.
Also in websites where you have a lot of information to convey, ex: banks, mortgages, etc. again chatbot makes sense. Because it helps give information that's selective to the customer. And they don't have to struggle through a lot of information presented to them at once.
We have customers who use our chatbot link directly on google ads.
We have also noticed our customers maturing over time and demanding more functionalities on the chatbots.
To summarize, no chatbots are not dead. They are only beginning. However, you need to narrow down on a specific problem and solve it.
> To summarize, no chatbots are not dead. They are only beginning.
Yes, there will likely be more chatbots in the future. And yes, THEN they will be usable. But no, it's not a good user experience yet.
If a website needs a chatbot they:
- Didn't put enough effort in organizing the website
Yep, I agree. However, even in the wake of GTP-3, maybe it is time to abandon the term Chatbot. Essentially "chatbots" are a tool to deal with unstructured data/content. At least this is how I see them: a better search interface.
>"The moment you create a chat bot is the moment you allow customers to have a conversation with your brand. Not with yourself, not with your friend, but with an uber entity—a symbol—that represents everything you and your team stand for. That’s not a step to be taken lightly."
As opposed to a call center in an impoverished country staffed with subsistence wage workers with an average tenure in the job of something like 6 months or less?
Companies talk a lot about CX and CRM until it's time to spend money on the front line workers who actually interact with the customers.
As a builder of chatbots and "conversational AI", non-annoying human-like chatbots are at least 20 years away, and ML approaches have not resulted in any improvements over basic symbolic reasoning approaches.
The biggest problem with chatbots is that getting conversations right is hard... and expensive. To make one actually helpful, it requires extensive knowledge not just about the potential topics that customers could ask about, but also linguistics, NLU/P/Q, scripting, and the diverse technical environments that these tools will be interacting with. With all the drag-and-drop chatbot creation tools out there now, companies are being sold on the idea that ANYONE can make these chats, and as such don't see the benefit of hiring an experienced professional whose sole job it is to make these things work well. Instead, their creation is being left to existing help desk/HR/doc employees that lack said in-depth cross-functional knowledge, with predictable results. Sparse NLU models are poorly constructed, background tasks are hacky and frequently broken, and the resulting chats are stilted and disjointed at best. Which is why they're so frustrating.
The tools to make good chatbots are complex, but they exist, and in the hands of someone who is trained in all of the requisite areas can be wielded to create something useful. It just costs money most companies don't believe is worth spending.
My favorite chatbot experience lately has been support directing me to the chatbot, which then informs me that I am capable of resolving the issue of cancelling/refunding or making changes to my transaction. It just happens to be the case, that I ordered the wrong thing. Simple as that.
As I travel to the appropriate link, there is none such ability or option. I relay the appropriate message to their customer service. Fast forward a day later, they were unable to reply to my message in time, they have already processed the order, and are actually begging me to accept the purchase because as a small company they are incapable of managing their customer service department.
All in all, I felt bad that they would have lost a substantial amount on my cancellation or refund. But I can't help but feel the entire situation could have been avoided if they had eschewed the "benefit" of "automating" their customer service.
I think a good reason Salesforce has been so successful is that they force users to abide by the one-reply system of following up on customers.
Can we kill automated phone answering systems too? They’re always a waste of time. I used to work as a customer service rep once, and apparently we had some kind of voice menu that people had to go through to get to us, but either they didn’t implement the connection to the humans or it broke at some point because we had no access to whatever they told it by the time they got to a human. They all had to give it their account numbers and whether they were placing an order, calling about a past order, etc, but all that info was just discarded before we picked up the phone. Because it’s just as fast for me to just say, “how can I help you” and listen to the answer as it would be to try to have the computer relay that to me secondhand from what the menu system picked up. It just wasted a few minutes of their time before it tossed them all to us anyway. I assume every customer service voice menu is the same. Maybe the management felt that the customers time is worthless since they don’t have to pay for it.
> Chat bots work best where users already are. If your users are primarily spending time in messaging platforms where bots and micro-apps can be seamlessly embedded, great.
Fully agreed with that. While for sure "boring" for many and not good as marketing tools, the best "chat bots" IMHO basically are inline commandline tools that help specific communities.
Funnily enough, chat bots are thriving on discord. The key is that those chat bots don't try to implement a conversational UI, they utilize specific commands and are an easy way to add features and automate administrative tasks.
Relate to OP here. I also built a travel chat bot[1] (now dead) in early stages of chatbot boom. Initially it felt like conversational UX is so much better. But very soon I realized I myself was not using what I built. What we don't realize is how efficient we have become using websites through that navigating through chatbot UX definitely feels waste of time.
Around the peak of chatbot hype, someone described them as "an obfuscated command line".
In my experience that's exactly what they are; you end up second-guessing the machine and thinking "what do I need to type to get where I need to be". It's like playing one of those old text based adventure games.
I can't remember a single encounter with a chatbot where a good search interface wouldn't have got me there faster.
[+] [-] dheera|5 years ago|reply
That attention disruption got so bad I blocked Intercom and their ilk via injected CSS rules.
I really want to take it a step further and write a plug in to interface a chat bot with the human on the other end and waste their time so sites begin to learn to stop using that BS.
[+] [-] GordonS|5 years ago|reply
Actually, the ones I really despise with a burning passion are the ones like above, but which follow you around the whole site like some kind of demented Clippy 2.0 - you close the popup and navigate to another page and... BAM! It's back, again!
[+] [-] belzebalex|5 years ago|reply
As developers who never need help, we tend to forget that some people might do, and that a Chatbox that annoys us can help them.
[+] [-] corobo|5 years ago|reply
https://github.com/bcye/Hello-Goodbye/
[+] [-] paledot|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lqet|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] st_goliath|5 years ago|reply
Agree. Over the last few years, I started running into those more and more often as well. From an UX standpoint I would categorize them somewhere between marque/blink tags and rotating GIF icons.
Actually, that was roughly the time from which I recall first running into those things on corporate websites (IIRC Yello Strom in Germany had one in the early 2000s, widely know for a particular Easter egg).
I find it kind of funny that those are having a revival in recent years, along with animated GIFs (abused as a video format this time round) and annoying overuse of the word "cyber".
[+] [-] eabraham|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vidarh|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] piracy1|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jamil7|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pier25|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] moron4hire|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] elwell|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] megablast|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Ennea|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shajznnckfke|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mard|5 years ago|reply
It's quite disappointing that it took a Google UX design lead to come up with something like this.
[+] [-] BeniBoy|5 years ago|reply
[1]: https://javier.xyz/control-user-cursor/
[+] [-] draugadrotten|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] LukaD|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tallanvor|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] metafunctor|5 years ago|reply
On an iPad, the site shows it's own context sensitive cursor below the iPadOS cursor, for extra weirdness.
[+] [-] dheera|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pier25|5 years ago|reply
It's almost as bad as websites customizing the CSS or scroll bars. Don't do that.
[+] [-] theon144|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Zaheer|5 years ago|reply
Everyone dreads call menus / phone trees - chatbots are largely the same except there are easier & better UX alternatives in an online medium.
[+] [-] nikanj|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chrisandchris|5 years ago|reply
I ended up googling and found out a secret keyword to talk to an agent who one can directly say after choosing a language. I never have been connected faster to a human when calling a large companys hotline.
[+] [-] mo1ok|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hyperdimension|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kdtop|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jackdh|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] febin|5 years ago|reply
I can't entirely agree with the points mentioned in this article.
Yes, a chatbot is not ready to replace human support.
However, there are other areas where they show good results.
We have been helping customers with lead generation chatbots for the last four years.
What we have learnt is customers would instead engage with a chatbot than filling up lengthy forms. Because chatbot nudges users to give information.
Also in websites where you have a lot of information to convey, ex: banks, mortgages, etc. again chatbot makes sense. Because it helps give information that's selective to the customer. And they don't have to struggle through a lot of information presented to them at once.
We have customers who use our chatbot link directly on google ads.
We have also noticed our customers maturing over time and demanding more functionalities on the chatbots.
To summarize, no chatbots are not dead. They are only beginning. However, you need to narrow down on a specific problem and solve it.
[+] [-] zeepzeep|5 years ago|reply
Yes, there will likely be more chatbots in the future. And yes, THEN they will be usable. But no, it's not a good user experience yet. If a website needs a chatbot they:
- Didn't put enough effort in organizing the website
- Don't want to spend money on real support
- Hate their customers
[+] [-] _the_inflator|5 years ago|reply
Yep, I agree. However, even in the wake of GTP-3, maybe it is time to abandon the term Chatbot. Essentially "chatbots" are a tool to deal with unstructured data/content. At least this is how I see them: a better search interface.
[+] [-] DebtDeflation|5 years ago|reply
As opposed to a call center in an impoverished country staffed with subsistence wage workers with an average tenure in the job of something like 6 months or less?
Companies talk a lot about CX and CRM until it's time to spend money on the front line workers who actually interact with the customers.
[+] [-] rawoke083600|5 years ago|reply
It's the digital version of the "automated phone guidance thing". The "press 1 for sales, press 2 for accounts, press 9 to kill yourself" !
I think many of the "smaller" websites has been sold a lie ! I see "silly/useless bots" that only makes the customer mad instead of helping him.
Just to show I'm not all hate and brimstone :) I found adding a "manned whatsApp" to your website is gold !
[+] [-] _-___________-_|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] crispyporkbites|5 years ago|reply
ChatBOXES on the other hand are amazing, a few reasons why:
- You can't accidentally hang up and have to re-dial and wait on hold
- There's an incentive for the company to respond while the customer is there, because they might disappear at any moment (unlike email)
- There's a record in writing
- It works with people with poor language skills
- No hold music & you can see where you are in the queue
- Support teams can scale by handling multiple conversations at once and using copy/paste from scripts, terms etc.
- You can include hyperlinks, screenshots etc. to make things super clear or open up other tools (e.g. screen share)
- Contact details, email address etc. can't be misheard
- No bad signal / fuzzy line
- You can data mine the requests to figure out common requests and optimize for them
Long live the chatbox!
[+] [-] not_a_moth|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kebman|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nullIsAnObject|5 years ago|reply
The tools to make good chatbots are complex, but they exist, and in the hands of someone who is trained in all of the requisite areas can be wielded to create something useful. It just costs money most companies don't believe is worth spending.
[+] [-] _5659|5 years ago|reply
As I travel to the appropriate link, there is none such ability or option. I relay the appropriate message to their customer service. Fast forward a day later, they were unable to reply to my message in time, they have already processed the order, and are actually begging me to accept the purchase because as a small company they are incapable of managing their customer service department.
All in all, I felt bad that they would have lost a substantial amount on my cancellation or refund. But I can't help but feel the entire situation could have been avoided if they had eschewed the "benefit" of "automating" their customer service.
I think a good reason Salesforce has been so successful is that they force users to abide by the one-reply system of following up on customers.
[+] [-] fallingfrog|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] detaro|5 years ago|reply
Fully agreed with that. While for sure "boring" for many and not good as marketing tools, the best "chat bots" IMHO basically are inline commandline tools that help specific communities.
[+] [-] shkkmo|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gandutraveler|5 years ago|reply
[1] https://www.itnry.com
[+] [-] rattyc|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] J-dawg|5 years ago|reply
In my experience that's exactly what they are; you end up second-guessing the machine and thinking "what do I need to type to get where I need to be". It's like playing one of those old text based adventure games.
I can't remember a single encounter with a chatbot where a good search interface wouldn't have got me there faster.