What are the Disadvantages of Chatbots?

Chatbots have exploded in popularity in recent years. Many businesses have embraced AI chatbots to automate customer service interactions. With their seeming ability to provide 24/7 support at a lower cost, it’s clear why chatbots are so enticing.

In this article, we’ll take an in-depth look at the perceived disadvantages of using chatbots in customer service. If you license a generative AI chatbot, you can eliminate most or all these disadvantages.

Limitations in Understanding Complex Input

One of the most significant disadvantages of many chatbots is their limited natural language processing ability.

Here are some scenarios that might trip up even advanced chatbot AI:

• Subtle humor or sarcasm that humans would notice
• Complex questions with multiple intents
• Exceptions or edge cases not covered in training data
• Misspellings, poor grammar, homonyms, and idioms
• Customers can pose the same question in many different ways

Chatbots not being able to answer customer questions can decrease customer satisfaction and reduce the overall customer experience.

Thankfully, the most recent generation of chatbots use generative AI, which leverages Large Language Language Models (LLMs). LLMs are massive artificial intelligence models that are are excellent at understanding complex input and creating relevant and accurate responses.

The Lack of a Human Touch

Despite rapid technological advances, many chatbots still lack critical human qualities like empathy, emotional intelligence, and making personal connections.

Human touch and empathy are still necessary in many scenarios, like:

• Grieving customers dealing with loss or tragedy
• When angry customers need to vent
• Customers with disabilities or special needs

It's always necessary to keep a human in the loop.

However, studies have found that generative AI chatbots can be even more empathetic than humans. Researchers at UC San Diego compared generative AI chatbot responses and actual physician responses to medical questions on Reddit. The generative AI chatbot responses were 9.8 times more empathetic than human responses.

Set-Up Time & Effort

The time and energy required to set-up a chatbot may be difficult, including:

• Creating complex rules and decision trees for the end user to navigate thru
• Writing extensive FAQs
• Writing different ways to write the same question
• Carving up existing documentation into smaller "snippets"
• Editing existing knowledge from disparate sources in the organization

Much of this set-up time and effort goes away when you use a generative AI chatbot. In fact, you can create a generative AI chatbot for free in under 2 hours using Gleen AI.

Ongoing Maintenance

The same chatbots that require significant time and energy to set up often require significant ongoing maintenance. Specifically:

• Complex rules and decision trees often need updating.
• Extensive FAQs need updating, especially as products and services change over time.
• You'll always be finding different ways for customers to ask the same question.
• Your organization will always be creating new knowledge/documentation.

Generative AI chatbots not only reduce set-up time -- they also reduce ongoing maintenance and improve customer service efficiency. Generative AI chatbots require 2 forms of ongoing maintenance:

• Periodic re-crawling of the knowledge base -- which can happen automatically
• Manual supervision of feedback. To improve its answers over time, a good generative AI chatbot will collect feedback on its responses. You will need to occasionally review responses with negative feedback and remove outdated knowledge and/or update outdated knowledge.

Data Security Concerns

Chatbots handling sensitive customer data can potentially expose businesses to security risks if not properly safeguarded.

Sophisticated hackers can finding ways to exploit weaknesses in chatbot platforms, using them as entry points into backend systems.

To mitigate data security risks, you should look for chatbot vendors who are/are becoming SOC 2 Type 2 certified.

With SOC 2 Type 2 certification, you can be confident your chatbot vendor's data security practices meet SaaS industry standards.

Bias

LLMs rely on training data from the entire internet. Because the internet can often be a biased place, generative AI chatbots that use LLMs can potentially create biased responses.

Best of breed generative AI chatbot should be able to constrain responses to the provided documentation. If there is no bias in the provided documentation, there should be no bias in the answers.

One example of a best of breed generative AI chatbot is Gleen AI. Gleen AI provides answers based solely on your proprietary knowledge base. As such, it's nearly impossible for Gleen AI to provide a biased response.

Hallucination

Hallucination is when a chatbot or LLM creates a response that contains a factually incorrect statement.

Hallucination occurs because LLMs only predict the next most probable word in a conversation. LLMs do not, however, determine whether or not the sentence or paragraph it produces is actually accurate.

Because of this, many people are afraid to put  generative AI chatbots in front of their paying customers.

Leading generative AI chatbots minimize or eliminate hallucination. For example, Gleen has focused on building a generative AI chatbot that doesn't hallucinate. 80% of Gleen's tech stack proactively focuses on preventing hallucination.

Conclusion:  Choose Wisely

Chatbots offer tremendous benefits, but they also have potential disadvantages.  These perceived disadvantages include:

• A limited ability to understand complex input
• A lack of empathy
• Set-up effort
• Ongoing maintenance effort
• Data security concerns
• Bias
• Hallucination

Choosing your chatbot vendor wisely can mitigate these perceived disadvantages. Specifically:

• Generative AI chatbots dramatically improve chatbots ability to understand complex input and their empathy. They also dramatically reduce set-up and maintenance effort.
• SOC 2 Type 2 certification can mitigate data security concerns with chatbots.
• Among generative AI chatbots, bias and hallucination can be concerns. However, best-of-breed generative AI chatbots like Gleen AI have removed bias and hallucination.

Want to transform your customer support with the power of generative AI? Create a generative AI chatbot with Gleen AI for free now, or request a demo of Gleen AI.