The best chatbot is better UX & content design

You can’t find the information you’re looking for on a company’s website, but there’s a little chat bubble in the corner promising to help. So you click it. You type your question. Surely, if the website doesn’t have the answer, this thing must. But it doesn’t. Instead, you get a cheerful, canned response that tells you something you already know, points you toward a page you’ve already visited, or answers an all together different question. You try rephrasing it. Maybe the AI will understand you this time. Nope. And that’s when you realize you’ve fallen for the trap.

The chatbot was never really there to help you find the information the website failed to provide. It was there to give you the impression that help was available. This is a digital cul-de-sac.

The problem isn’t that chatbots are artificial

There’s nothing inherently wrong with automation.

If I want to know your hours of operation, a chatbot can tell me. If I want to know whether you offer a particular service, it might be able to point me in the right direction. If I’m looking for a tracking number or want to check the status of an order, automation can make perfect sense. But a good website should already be able to answer most of those questions. That’s what websites are for!

If customers routinely need to ask your chatbot when you’re open, what services you offer, where you’re located, whether you accept a particular payment method, or how to contact you, you need to ask yourself a question:

“Why can’t people find this information on our website?”

That’s a content and UX problem. And putting a chatbot on top of it doesn’t solve the problem. It just puts another interface between the customer and the information they’re trying to find.

Often, if not most of the time, users reach out to the chatbot when they’ve got a semi-complicated question, or a unique issue that pertains to them directly, something a canned answer just can’t help with. A customer who wants to know your hours probably doesn’t care whether they’re talking to a human or a machine. But a customer who’s been charged incorrectly, has a problem with an order, or has a question that your website doesn’t address is much different.

• They may already have tried your website
• They may have searched your help section
• They may have clicked through three layers of navigation

And now they’re looking for a person. And replacing the phone number with a chatbot—or burying the phone number somewhere in the footer and putting a big “Chat with us!” button in its place—isn’t innovation. It’s a dirty trick.

You’re not making customer service more accessible. You’re making it harder for customers to reach the people who can actually help them.

Not everyone knows they’re talking to a chatbot

This is another problem that doesn’t get enough attention.

People who work in technology tend to understand what AI can and can’t do. Plenty of other people don’t. They see a little chat window pop up and reasonably assume that there’s some kind of intelligent assistance waiting on the other side. So they ask their question.

When the response is vague, generic or completely beside the point, they may assume they did something wrong. Maybe they didn’t phrase the question correctly. Maybe they need to click one of the suggested options. Maybe there’s another way to explain the problem. So they keep trying without realizing they’ve fallen into the abyss.

The business has created the appearance of providing instant assistance without necessarily providing any useful assistance at all. That’s a UX failure.

We’ve been here before

There’s also a bigger issue that bothers me about the rush toward AI.

I’ve worked in environments where “customer service” increasingly meant giving customers access to people who were themselves working from scripts and canned responses. And I’ve watched companies celebrate changes that allowed them to replace Canadian jobs with offshore labour.

I remember my days working at Bell Canada, when legislative changes that lowered the minimum number of Canadians they needed keep on staff in call centres, and made it easier to hire off-shore employees, were celebrated by management. “Hooray! We can close down another east coast call centre!” I felt sick. It was bad enough when I was researching and writing thousands of FAQs for the website to help decrease call volume—at least that was helping the user, and saving them the agony of time spent fighting IVRs and waiting on hold. Now they were actively chopping Canadian jobs.

Whatever you think about the economics of outsourcing, the underlying philosophy is familiar: find a way to provide the appearance of service while reducing the cost of providing actual human service. AI chatbots are the latest version of that idea. And unlike an offshore call-centre employee, a chatbot doesn’t need a salary, benefits, vacation time or a lunch break.

From a company’s perspective, I suppose that’s compelling. From a customer’s perspective, it isn’t necessarily an improvement.

The chatbot gold rush is good news for some web agencies

There’s another uncomfortable piece to this: AI is the hot new thing. Businesses are being told they need AI, that they need chatbots, that they need to “leverage conversational AI” to engage customers and stay competitive. And, naturally, there are web agencies happy to sell it to them.

I’m not saying every agency offering chatbot integration is doing something wrong. Some chatbots have legitimate uses, and there are situations where automation can genuinely improve user experience (UX). But small-business owners should be skeptical of anyone telling them that putting an AI chatbot on their website is going to make the website better.

It might. Or it might simply give you an expensive new feature that frustrates your customers. Technology isn’t a strategy.

Try fixing the website first

Before you spend money putting an AI assistant on your website, try something considerably less exciting: Make your website easier to use. Look at the questions customers actually ask you. Then make sure the answers are on the website, written in plain language, and that they’re easy to find.

• Don’t make people hunt for your phone number
• Don’t hide your hours of operation
• Don’t make someone download a PDF to find a piece of information that could have been written on the page
• Don’t force people through a chatbot because you don’t want to publish an answer publicly

And if your customers need to speak to a human being, tell them when a human being will actually be available. “We’re open Monday to Friday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Call us and we’ll be happy to help” is not outdated technology. It’s helpful customer service.

FAQs can be a great workaround

If you’re not sure where a particular piece of information belongs in your site’s information architecture, there’s nothing wrong with creating a well-organized FAQs page. It can be a useful safety net for those questions that don’t fit neatly into a particular page. The important part is making the FAQs easy to find and easy to navigate—not treating it as a dumping ground for everything you couldn’t figure out where else to put.

And don’t make the mistake of using your FAQs only to answer the questions that are good for business. The questions that make you uncomfortable may be the ones customers most need answered. If a customer wants to know how to cancel a service, return a product, get out of a contract, or understand an additional fee, give them a straight answer. It might feel anti-business in the short term, but being deliberately difficult to deal with is a great way to lose trust.

I remember this from my days at Bell Canada. There was a time when the information customers needed to add services was readily available, while information about how to cancel particular services was much harder to find. The business logic was pretty obvious: if a customer couldn’t easily figure out how to cancel, perhaps they’d give up and pay for another month of something they no longer wanted.

That’s a very different philosophy from designing content to empower the customer. And I think we’re finally beginning to understand that making it easy for people to make informed decisions—including decisions that aren’t necessarily in your immediate financial interest—is one of the best ways to earn their trust.

Good content design is often a better solution… especially for small businesses

There’s a strange tendency in web design to assume that newer technology automatically creates a better experience. But it doesn’t.

A well-designed website can answer questions before they’re asked. Good content design can anticipate what people need and organize information around the way they actually look for it. Clear navigation can eliminate unnecessary searching. And a plainly presented phone number can do something a chatbot often can’t: Get you to a human being. That’s not anti-technology. It’s pro-customer.

AI has some genuinely useful applications. Chatbots may eventually become much better at understanding complicated questions, finding information and knowing when they can’t help, or even assisting with logged-in account-related problems. But until then, businesses shouldn’t confuse having an AI chatbot with providing good customer service.

If your website is difficult to navigate and your important information is hard to find, adding a chatbot isn’t fixing your UX. It’s putting a robot in front of it. And if the customer is asking to speak to a human, maybe the most intelligent thing your chatbot can do is get out of the way.

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