2016 saw the meteoric rise of chatbots, at least in the tech and venture capital worlds. So far, 2017 tells a different story. Following the familiar path of all over-hyped technologies both the developer and implementer communities are at the entrance into the chatbot “valley of despair.”

We’ll be examining multiple aspects of the chatbot question during many sessions of our upcoming Intelligent Assistants Conference in London. In preparation, we suggest you consider the viewpoints of a couple of thoughtful industry leaders illustrating two, quite different suggestions addressing how the chatbot community should climb out of the hole.

Techcrunch recently published the results of an interview with Ted Livingston, CEO of popular messaging platform Kik. According to Livingston, chatbots are stalled because current platforms haven’t given bots the power of payments. Consumers are engaging with bots, Livingston maintains, but the experience stops short of consummating a deeper relationship because bot users can’t make purchases. Thus they lack the functionality of the mobile apps they aim to replace and they haven’t presented bot makers with enough ways to convert conversations into tangible revenue.

Tech reporter Jon Russell notes in the article that Chinese mega-company Tencent posted profit jumps based on increases in mobile payments made from its popular messaging platform WeChat. Competing bot platforms such as Facebook Messenger, Kik, Line, and Telegram are all looking for ways to tap into the payments revenue stream. Facebook added support for payments into its Bot Framework last spring.

A second article on the topic of chatbot fatigue was authored by Rurik Bradbury of Liveperson. Bradbury has a much different take on the underlying causes of chatbot engagement issues. In his view, consumers became quickly disenchanted with standalone chatbots. By “standalone” Bradbury means chatbots that are not integrated into live agent support systems.

These standalone bots are generally very limited in their capabilities, often don’t understand what the user wants, and reply to anything they don’t understand with a frustrating “oops, I haven’t learned that yet” phrase.

According to Bradbury, chatbots will rise like a phoenix from the ashes once they are integrated with a company’s mature customer support channels. The mistake was disassociating the chatbot from a company’s existing CRM systems, skilled human agents, and underlying knowledge sources. Once chatbots and human agents can work seamlessly in tandem, users will no longer find chatbot engagement frustrating.

While these two perspectives on what’s ailing chatbots differ, they both show that reports on the death of chatbots are greatly exaggerated. Thousands of companies large and small are reaping significant ROI from mature intelligent assistance solutions. Messaging-based chatbots are a new addition to those customer self-service tools. As companies get more experience with implementing these tools, our view is that they will prove to be an extremely valuable resource.

Categories: Conversational Intelligence, Intelligent Assistants

Tags: mobile payments, intelligent Assistants, chatbots