Do bots work for your SaaS?
We’re working on a customer support tool and part of this involves a chat tool. (FWIW: We built this product to providing support for our other SaaS products.)
I’m big on offering personalized support. As such, I hop on any inbound questions as quickly as I can. In my experience, customers love this level of support—especially when they realize that a real person is helping them out.
That said, almost every prospect I contact about our support product just wants to automate the entire process, with bots. While I appreciate that this reduces interruptions/effort, I’m of the mind that it represents a missed opportunity—as every experience I’ ve had with a bot is pretty sucky.
So, I figured I’d ask if this is just my bias getting in the way. How’s your SaaS’ experience been with chatbots. Do your customers like interacting in that way? Are you seeing positive results from this sort of tool? How often do you end up giving more one-on-one support because the bot isn’t good enough?
In my experience, users hate bots. We've noticed that even when you answer them back some predefined saved message, they many times say "I want to speak with a human, not a bot" even that it's us writing, but the fact that we send long texts in a short period, they think we are bots.
So people like to speak with people as they can understand their problems and needs. Bots are just a set of predefined answers to a predefined set of problems and somehow people don't like that.
I agree. In fact, I was on a site this morning (a Government of Canada page with information on travel) that pushed me to use their bot, so I gave it a try.
Turned out that it was effectively a chat-based interface for navigating the content that was on that page. Maybe this is useful for some folks, but I’d be fine with just reading the page’s text.