The vast majority of us send dozens of personal text messages daily. Today, many businesses are also using the messaging channel to communicate with their customers.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) may be the big buzzword, but even huge businesses like Amazon that invested millions of dollars into AI are jettisoning AI-powered chatbots in favor of simple, rules-based chatbots.
What’s Wrong with AI?
Implementing AI, whether it’s Natural Language Processing (NLP) or Machine Learning (ML), requires not only a huge investment of both time and money; it also requires clean data and a company-wide commitment to continually update and maintain the solution.
Before you even consider AI, see if you can answer yes to these three key questions:
- Is AI at the heart of your company’s strategy? Do you have executive buy-in?
- Does your company have the necessary financial and technical resources?
- Is your data contained in the format that AI can use and comprehend?
AI must be at the heart of the company’s strategy because it affects so many different departments and disciplines. And consider the costs, which can top $100,000 or more for one prototype. Finally, companies must have a lot of data to drive their AI solution. The vast majority of small and medium sized businesses simply don’t have ample data to implement AI.
Solving the Problem – Simply.
Meanwhile, a simple chatbot can answer text messages and handle many customer service inquiries without the huge expenditure of time and resources. In fact, the business can usually get a return on their investment in less than a month. It’s the old 80-20 rule: 80 percent of the time, a simple chatbot can do the job just fine.
The irony is that when chatbots got simpler, customer service improved. Simple, rules-based chatbots get the job done the vast majority of the time, especially when the job is solving issues where AI would not help. That’s because most people are asking simple questions that can be answered by a simple chatbot. Plus, simple, rules-based chatbots are much simpler to implement; they can be up and running in minutes.
The best place to start is by identifying the most common questions that can be answered by a simple automated messaging solution. The business saves money without having to have common questions answered by a human, but the job gets done without a huge investment.
In short: smarter is not better, at least when it comes to bots. Even the most sophisticated companies like Amazon have come to recognize that simple chatbots can deliver customer service with the minimum amount of missteps and mishaps.
Get in touch with me today and I’ll show you how easy this can be.
Shane Unfred
Executive V.P., Business Development and Product Development