Does AI Chatbot have limitations? - Artificial Intelligence (AI) Chatbot in Malaysia, For You

Does AI Chatbot have limitations?

An illustration of Bajau Laut or Sea Gypsies floating villages near Mabul Island, Malaysia

Most businesses are aware of how fast AI Chatbot industry is growing and how what first looked like a tech fad has moved on to becoming a promising tool to deliver real results.

In fact, AI chatbots have successfully taken over basic customer service tasks in recent years. But is the technology ready to go further? If you are considering AI chatbots for your business, let’s spend a couple of minutes to find out their advantages and potential limitations.

The Advantages of AI Chatbot

Always-On

One of the most attractive advantages of the technology is its availability 24/7. Unlike a live agent, AI Chatbot helps to answer your customer questions immediately when needed — anytime.

Highly Efficient

While a live agent can only attend to one customer at one time, AI Chatbot has the capacity to respond to a handful of concurrent conversations without any waiting time. This helps businesses to respond to customer issues and needs quickly and efficiently.

Rather than the conventional methods of requesting help (online forms or call queues), reducing waiting time improves customer satisfaction towards a business too.

Cost Optimisation

Live agents require to spend more time handling customer requests compared to AI Chatbots. The technology can empower businesses to automate repetitive end-to-end business processes, leaving only complex cases for live agents to take on.

With this, businesses also increase the opportunity to convert customers who are in the consideration buying cycle to make a purchase.

But like all things, AI Chatbot comes with some undeniable limitations businesses should be aware of.

It is not a human

All AI Chatbots can only respond to users as much as they are trained to do.

The lack of human context understanding appears to be a clear limitation of the technology. For example, when a user is asking something which the AI Chatbot is not trained to address, it will fail to respond meaningfully, causing unintended frustration to the customer. Intuition simply does not exist in the AI world.

You need time to develop a smart AI Chatbot

Okay, this is not entirely a limitation but we do hear many hoping to set up an AI Chatbot within minutes. Surely there are platforms available to make this happen to meet short term goals. It is important to understand AI Chatbot needs training effort, more so if there is integration involved.

The tip is to not rush through the development process. Spend time to build the dialogs using the customer insights you have gathered and test furiously and revise constantly to improve your AI Chatbot knowledge base quality.

“65% of CIOs saw an increase in the use of self-service by customers/citizens in 2020, 79% expect that usage to grow in 2021.”

— Gartner forecast in their CIO Agenda 2021

Expect to scale

It is important to choose a solution platform that allows you to scale over time as your AI Chatbot begins to take on more responsibilities based on your customer’s needs and demands. AI is yet to reach its peak so making sure the latest technologies are available in your preferred solution platform is key to the growth in your AI Chatbot capacity.

On top of that, AI Chatbot migration from one platform to another cost great effort so consider going with the big guys like Google Dialogflow or Microsoft for long-term goals.

Making decisions (or the lack of it)

Due to the lack of the ability to discern between good and bad at this point, conversations are designed to neither make decisions or help customers to make decisions, fearing the reliance on AI to respond may bring negative outcomes. This was a lesson many has learned from the tech giant, Microsoft crisis.

On March 23, 2016, Microsoft attracted many controversies due to its chatbot Tay, causing them to shut down the chatbot temporarily.

The good news is many companies are still pouring resources into AI Chatbot technology so there’s hope for it to perform better in the future.

Responding to the limitations

With the challenges faced from the technology’s limitation at present time, developers are actively finding ways to provide high-quality conversation design nonetheless. Here are some of the areas we focus on to bring out the best of AI Chatbot:

Better no-intent handling

Users have a short attention span (and patience) when it comes to getting things done. When an AI Chatbot fails to provide a good response beyond its standard answer, users get frustrated. Such irritation can lead to poor customer satisfaction which is a nightmare for all businesses.

To avoid that, we program our chatbot to move on to gather user’s information upon failing three times so that the information can be sent to the Customer Experience Team to follow up and resolve instead of prolonging the frustration.

Unparalleled user experience

AI Chatbot interface design affects the overall engagement experience. With poor interface design (UI), users tend to leave without attempting to give an AI Chatbot a try.

XIMNET went beyond the common chat window UI and pioneered a full-page interface so that users feel more in control of the flow. This implementation also allows us to flash out more information for users to make decisions within the interface.

Leveraging on web content

AI Chatbot interface has limited real estate to present extensive content meaningfully. XTOPIA.IO AI Chatbot interacts with the website by loading page content seamlessly, as well as hiding and showing a chat window when necessary, making the conversation experience exceptional.

Summing up

Inevitably, AI Chatbots have been widely adopted in digital engagement, although many are still doing their best to maximise the technology’s capability. We also see giant brands such as Microsoft and Google committing resources to enhance the quality of AI Chatbot delivery. If you are planning to take on AI Chatbot as part of your execution to meet long-term goals, invest in a platform that provides stability and scalability.

Deep learning methods may be one of the promising components for AI Chatbot in the future so as a team, we are hoping to dive into all possibilities to make it accessible for our customers in due time.

XIMNET is a digital solutions provider with two decades of track records specialising in web application development, AI Chatbot and system integration in Malaysia. XIMNET is launching a brand new way of building ChatGPT-powered AI Chatbot with XYAN. Get in touch with us to find out more.

about the article

This article is first published on XIMNET Medium. More resources available here.

XIMNET is one of the leading tech agency for AI Chatbot in Malaysia.