Customer service chatbot

It's worth it when you get lots of repeated questions (opening hours, prices, order status, how to make a return) and you have that information in writing to give to the bot. If every enquiry is different, sensitive or requires a decision, the chatbot will save you little and may end up annoying your customers. Nobody wants to argue a complaint with a machine that answers with infinite politeness and zero solutions.

The key is what you feed it and how it reacts when it doesn't know. A good chatbot answers from your documents (your FAQs, your terms, your catalogue) and, when it can't find the answer, says so and hands the conversation over to a person. The problem with AIs is that they tend to make things up with confidence, what's called hallucinating, and in front of a customer that's expensive. It should also be clear that people are talking to an AI; the European AI law points that way, and misleading a customer never ends well.

How I built my first chatbot, what failed and what it does when it doesn't know the answer I explain in "My first chatbot". If you're considering one, do the paper test first: write down the questions you get for a couple of weeks. If most of them repeat, there's a case for a chatbot; if not, maybe what you need is a good FAQ page.