Chatbots are becoming increasingly common as a method for customers to get assistance for simple questions without customer service assistant.

So, it doesn’t come as a surprise that chatbots are expected to generate revenues in excess of whooping one thousand million dollars by 2025.

Chatbots are now very often the first stage of consumer support for clearing up straightforward issues or elevating more difficult problems to a human care team. Still, some negativity surrounds the idea of chatbot usage and benefits or risks.

Chatbot myths to stop believing 

Let’s outline some common myths relating to chatbots and find the truth through numbers that don’t lie. 

1. Interest in chatbots will slow down

Chatbots are a hot topic in emerging technologies, and like anything new, they can arouse suspicions and doubts. This is not going to slow down their implementation though, as they are popular with businesses:

• 80% of 800 worldwide company decision-makers said that they already implement chatbots or plan to by the year 2020.
• As for automation technologies in general, they are already in use by 48% of respondents in the areas of sales, marketing and/or customer service.
• What’s more, 42% of those surveyed believe that automation technologies will improve customer service more than any other solutions.

2. Users prefer to talk to "real" people

Now we’ve established that businesses want chatbots – do the customers? It might be natural to assume that customers would rather be able to have immediate contact with another human rather than getting help, at least initially, from a chatbot. However, despite our intuitions, statistics from surveys across various business segments tell a rather different story: 

• 53% of customers say that they are more likely to complete a purchase if they can contact the selling company through an app.
• 35% of consumers would like more companies to make use of chatbots.
• Businesses should be contactable through messaging apps, according to nearly 64% of people in a survey.
• 34% of users on e-commerce sites would actually prefer to answer questions asked by a virtual assistant than a real person.
• Chatbots are the first port of call for simple queries, since 55% of users prefer to get instant responses from a chatbot. 
• 40% of millennials reportedly claim to use chatbots as regularly as on a daily basis. 

3. Customer service won’t be improved by chatbots

It goes without saying that complex issues will require customer service agents to address them, but for many FAQs and common problems chatbots can actually be more effective than humans. The reason is that 75% of customers expect to receive an instant response, which is something that customer service departments simply can’t hope to satisfy but where chatbots excel.

Secondly, more than 50% of users prefer to have 24/7 contact possible with a business, which chatbots are able to provide at no additional cost. As a result, chatbots are usually the best solution to provide help with simple enquiries, particularly for the e-commerce industry as one one of the most leading sectors for chatbots. 

4. Messenger chatbots don’t improve efficiency

Although chatbots can deal with many simple problems, some people simply view chatbots as an unnecessary step to reaching a human customer service agent who can assist with more complex issues. Yet the statistics show that chatbots do lower costs and reduce response times:

• Chatbots can help decrease customer service costs by 30%, which translates to approximately $23B on the US market alone.
• IBM Watson built a virtual assistant called AVA for Autodesk, helping them decrease the cost per query from between $15 and $200 to just $1 decreasing response from over 24 hours to under 5 minutes.
• Chatbots help lower telephone costs, and the cost of an outbound call is about 33% lower than the cost of an inbound call if the user asks to be transferred to a human agent. 

5. It is difficult to create and implement Facebook Messenger chatbots

That may well be true were it not for the fact that they don’t need to be created completely from scratch but rather tried and tested solutions for your business can be implemented via ready-made templates and plugins. A wide range of solutions already exist on the market depending on the chatbot platform that one opts for.

Some offer a huge amount of options but in turn they require a certain level of technical knowledge and are time consuming to implement. On the other hand, it is possible to create fully functional Facebook Messenger chatbots in a matter of minutes without having any coding skills, by using tools for building some conversational marketing platforms. 

6. Messenger chatbots don’t understand the user

Another common misconception is that chatbots are restricted to only perform in pre-programmed scenarios, whereas the truth is that they are actually able to develop themselves through natural language processing and machine learning. This means that chatbots get more intelligent the more they are used, and when a new user action is intended the results can be analyzed by the developer later and programmed accordingly if it does not already exist in the database.

Suppose that someone would like to order curry without coriander, but the chatbot only knows the term “cilantro”. Learning with natural language processing software would help the chatbot to understand, then, that “coriander” can be added to the dictionary after the message has been reviewed.  

7. Messenger chatbots are too clingy

It wasn’t long after the first Messenger chatbots were released that there were reports of users receiving too many spam messages. This stereotype is clearly not unfounded then; after all, it’s easy to understand why marketers would get excited about seeing much higher open rates compared to email marketing and quickly become encouraged to send ever more unsolicited messages.

However, it should also be easy to see that this is not the fault of the chatbot, which doesn’t automatically get too attached to its users, but of the creator whose instructions they follow. Marketers need to be careful not to overuse chatbots and only send notifications when they have something really relevant, interesting or newsworthy to say.

Chatbot myths, be gone!

Each of these now debunked myths have grown from ideas or misconceptions that are quite believable, so it is easy to sympathise with people who may hold those points of view. However, all of the above stereotypes have now been disproven with the use of unignorable facts and figures to support the arguments. There is no need for anyone to have any fears about implementing or using chatbots anymore, so go ahead and use one to boost your business today. 

Now that you're fear-free, find the best chatbot software solutions for your needs, all neatly laid out for you on G2.