I consider it a personal weakness of mine that I shame a company for something they spent too little attention to, without them being able to defend themselves.

I was going to complain about the fact that I have been checked three times this week and every time I got checked I felt like a thief. Or rather I felt that they thought I was a thief.

But I’m going to do it anyway 🙂 Just because it is uniquely bad and I want to share this with you. To learn from.

This morning I decided to work on my administration. I thought it could come in handy one day that I have it organised. So that I can find things.

So when it came to my car insurance I went to the website of the company that my insurance is at and went to my personal environment. I expected to be able to find my invoices there.

long story short: I couldn’t find it there. So I decided to contact the company to see if they knew where I could find it. They offered several contact options like email, telephone, whatsapp and chat.

I was working on it now and was waiting for those documents. So I decided to go with chat first because I didn’t feel like being guided through multiple menus on the telephone.

I pressed ‘Chat with us’ and this popped up:

I was so shocked that I didn’t know what to do next.

Why would a company allow such a terrible experience on their website?
My heart sank as I assumed that this could have been the bright idea of a marketing manager to lighten the load on the customer service staff and save costs—without considering the customer’s needs, of course. I have seen it done before.

So I tried ALL the other possibilities to see which one would answer first. The winner was someone who answered me via Messenger after an hour or so. It’s not good, but it’s not terrible either.

I decided to examine the current state of chatbots. I typed ‘best chatbot 2020 for users’ in Google and viewed the results.

Scrolling down the page, I only saw results promoting bots, mainly from a sales point of view.

Where oh where was an article that looked at chatbots from a user’s p.o.v.?

As I came to the end of page one I couldn’t find anything that satisfied me, so for the first time in a long time, I clicked on page 2 of the search results. And finally, halfway the page was an article on the website of the Nielsen Norman Group called ‘The User Experience of Chatbots’. The article was from 2018. Fine.

The first sentence of that article is: The chatbot is the poor relative of the intelligent assistant. which looked promising enough for me to continue reading. The article goes on to say that chatbot growth and popularity is motivated by at least three different factors:

1. The hope to reduce customer-service costs by replacing human agents with bots
2. The success of conversational-based systems put forward the idea of chatbots as an interaction channel with businesses and services
3. The popularity of voice-based intelligent assistants such as Alexa and Google Home has pushed many businesses to emulate them at a smaller scale.

I leave it to you to read the article yourself. My key takeaway is that there is still a long way to go before a chatbot or digital assistant is able to help you as a real person can. However, there are situations where bots are useful. When users deal with simple and linear tasks for example. Speed was seen as the most important advantage of a bot over a human in that case.

All in all, I feel a bit bad that I took this company as an example for this post. But I also feel that they could have made more of an effort to get it right.

Just follow the advice that the NN group gives you:

NN/g’s UX Guidelines for Designing Chatbots:

• Be upfront about using a bot and not a human.
• Clearly tell people what tasks the bot can do.
• Make sure you don’t create false expectations.
• Don’t be overly ambitious: create bots for simple tasks. Complexity is not well handled in the limited bot interface.
• Tolerate typos and ambiguity.
• Allow people to interact with the bot both through free-text input and selection of links.
• Allow sorting and filtering to let people narrow down through results.
• Save information from one task to the next.
• Program some flexibility into the bot: infer context and allow people to jump forward and backward in the linear flow.
• Be honest about not understanding. Offer an escape hatch in the form of a real human, a phone number, or a link to a different interaction channel.