Effectiveness of chatbots: methods that help evaluate the service’s usefulness
Juniper Research predicts that the number of chatbots in the global market will grow to 9.5 billion by 2026. They will be most in demand in e-commerce, but they will be used extensively in other areas as well. Despite such high expectations, the effectiveness of chatbots for many companies is still rather tentative. The reason for this may be the difficulty in measuring the usefulness of such services.
In most cases, specialists track conversion rates, growth of a lead generation, and other metrics to evaluate bots. Internal analytics are used for this, but effectiveness can also be tracked by other characteristics. For example, they take into account the purpose of introducing a program, its type, and the level of complexity. Voice chat-bots help to achieve some results, and text ones – others. The former takes care of advising on incoming calls and their processing. In addition, they can make outgoing calls to conduct surveys or inform.
The metric for evaluating the success of chatbots in the case of sales is the client’s consent to certain conditions, such as switching to a new mobile operator plan or agreeing to renew credit terms, if it’s a bank. The effectiveness in the case of outgoing calls can be the number of people who took the survey and the percentage of rejections.
Automated systems are ideal for collecting and processing data, they do it much faster and better than humans. According to analytics, on average a bot processes 5 times more applications than a human.
Virtual assistants can also be evaluated using universal indicators. The first of these is calculating the percentage of accepted requests in terms of their share in the total number of incoming requests. This parameter also depends on the capacity of the program itself, which means that it is important to focus on the scalability of the bot when developing it. Another important indicator is the speed of processing requests – and here virtual assistants do many times better than humans. The program is able to answer several questions at the same time, and in this case, it is difficult for a person to switch from one client to another.
To understand the benefits of introducing chatbots, you need to assess the quality of their work. To do this, they analyze whether the request was solved the first time, or whether the client had to go to a real consultant. Most often, to track this characteristic, at the end of the dialog with the bot they add a question: “Was the dialog useful to you?”, “Was your problem solved?”.
Chatbots are already taking on a huge number of tasks, saving businesses the cost of hiring additional staff. However, to maximize their effectiveness it is necessary to clearly define the purpose of using such programs.
