It’s easy to mess up. To say the wrong thing. Mistakes and accidents happen. And that’s as true for chatbots as it is for humans.
You could have a perfectly trained and tuned bot. It’s delightful to your customers, it’s easing the workload for your support teams.
But as much as we want it to be, it’s not infallible.
Even a highly maintained chatbot can make the occasional faux pas.
A forgotten or neglected one, then, can quickly become a weak link in your customer service chainmail.
Lost the chatbot plot
When setting up and deploying your chatbot, you spend time tuning it to your brand’s tone of voice.
You equip it with the question and answer sets it needs to give great service. In an ideal world, that would be it. You’d press go on your chatbot and leave it to do its job.
The thing is, chatbots can be dumb — even the high-tech ones. They can pick up the wrong intent, on occasion.
Or, a customer could encounter an issue where the bot has lost context or applied the wrong weights to probabilities. This makes for a frustrating experience.
Plus, your business will change and adapt over time. Your product will evolve, your business tone of voice could change. And before long, your chatbot is horrifically outdated to boot.
Herein lies the need for ongoing chatbot monitoring.
An example in action
The Babylon health chatbot is a chatbot designed and trained to advise patients on likely causes for their symptoms. With this, they have more information before they decide if they need to contact their GP. Or they can prepare for the potential diagnoses they are facing.
This chatbot is backed by the NHS. Its algorithm was tested with 100 real-life scenarios. The Babylon health bot has even (allegedly) passed a medical exam with 81%, where the human average is 72%.
Yet, for all this tuning and training, the bot still blundered in 2019.
It advised a 66-year-old UK woman that her weight loss and coughing up blood most likely indicated a tapeworm. (Despite tapeworms being very rare in the UK.)
It listed chest infections and ‘something more serious’ as less likely.
In another instance, the bot advised a woman with a breast lump that she most likely has osteoporosis (weakening bones).
For the most part, the bot has performed well.
But these rare examples demonstrate that not even the highly lauded chatbots are exempt from the need for chatbot monitoring.
Chatbot monitoring
The lesson in all this is to remain vigilant with your chatbot monitoring.
Watch for failed conversations, outdated pop culture references (if your bot uses them), and incorrect outcomes. This is where you’ll find gaps in your bot’s knowledge and bugs that impact its accuracy.
Another part of your chatbot monitoring should include asking for feedback from bot users. Your customers are the ones interacting with your bot, and they will be able to tell you if it’s working for them.
Finally, chatbot monitoring also means you need to keep testing and updating with your products. Don’t neglect your bot maintenance, monitor to make sure that every update goes as smoothly as possible.
The point is, keep an eye on your bots.
With WhosOn, bot monitoring can help you observe your chatbot in action. More, it can let you advise and intervene in bot conversations as needed. (And take chats over or force a transfer, too.)
Keep an eye on your chatbot
Chatbots are a fantastic tool, but beware the pitfall of forgetting about yours.
Bots don’t suit a ‘launch it and leave it’ mindset. No matter how tuned, trained and perfect your chatbot is, ongoing chatbot monitoring is a must.
There’s always something to tweak, improve or update.
You wouldn’t leave your human agents to fend for themselves with no supervision or training. Just as agent monitoring is important, so too is chatbot monitoring.