Good Bot. Bad Bot. Building Effective Chatbots for Customer Service

A couple of years ago, when talking about bots, people would have easily given you either a questioning side-eye or a pitiful look. Bots have long had a bad rep in the general public. The naughty list includes click bots that mess with your pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns, imposter bots that launch denial of service attacks, scraper bots that steal your meticulously crafted content, spam bots that keep pestering you with unwarranted emails or form submission and social media bots that spread noise and the proverbial'fake news'. In fact, 80% of companies plan to implement chatbots by 2020. Today, chatbots play a role in many business functions, including marketing, eCommerce and customer service, the latter of which has the potential to produce $23 billion in savings.