Your Customer Support Solution's Chatbot May Be Putting Off B2B Buyers

If you sell a contact center solution, how good is your chatbot? It’s a critical question, and it doesn’t only apply to the end users of the solution: it’s also a deciding factor in whether companies decided to buy your solution over a competitive platform.

AI conversation automation company Conversica Inc. announced the findings of a new survey titled, “Chatbot Experience: How Satisfied Are Enterprise Buyers?” The study found that while the majority of business-to-business (B2B) buyers use chatbots when considering a business purchase (60 percent is the figure), the chat experience does not meet their expectations. With a third of business buyers identifying chat experience as having a major impact on their evaluation of a vendor, companies are losing out on revenue.

The study concluded that many B2B buyers are turning away from traditional chatbots due to their simplistic capabilities that are limited to very early stages of interaction, according to the survey findings. (In short, customers have had it with interacting with “dumb” Ais that never seem to understand what they are asking.) As a result, buyers considering a business purchase are disappointed enough in most chatbot experiences to abandon conversations in favor of human representatives or, worse, move on to a competitor, leading to negative brand associations, increased workload, and lost revenue.

The study results showed that business purchasers find the chatbots they encounter while considering vendors to be largely unhelpful, with utility being limited to very early purchase stages. The largest group of business purchasers surveyed (40 percent) said they choose not to interact with chatbots at all. Of those who do choose to interact, the largest group does it early in the research phase.

“Further illustrating the point, only 11 percent said they have interacted with chatbots through all phases of the purchasing cycle,” said Jim Kaskade, CEO of Conversica. “Traditional chatbots aren’t generating revenue, but rather, at best, are focused on simply capturing the lead’s contact information and handing it off to a human for follow-up at a future time. Traditional chatbots struggle to address your customer’s needs even in the early stages of engaging with your brand, let alone at more advanced stages.”

Edited by Greg Tavarez