Want your chatbot design to deliver genuine customer engagement? Build it properly, writes Matt Grobler, pre-sales engineer at Inovo. Well, not unless they've been integrated intelligently and strategically to create a seamless customer journey. By 2022, Gartner predicts that 70% of customer interactions with businesses will involve emerging technologies such as machine learning (ML) applications, chatbots and mobile messaging. Chatbots are a bit like magic in that they are powerful tools in the right hands.

Not all chatbots are created equal. Be ready for multiple channels. People want to contact chatbots via their favorite messaging platform, such as WeChat, WhatsApp, Slack, or Facebook Messenger, or with voice assistants such as those powered by Siri. Platform popularity differs across countries, age groups, and use cases, so you can't pick one and expect users to come to you. You need to be able to build a bot once that can run on many channels and can quickly add new channels, without having to rewrite it.

The rise of chatbot technologies has not been the stunning success many people anticipated. The technology is now ubiquitous, but chatbots are more famous for their failures than successes. For instance, Microsoft's Tay faced a wave of media scorn after the internet trained it to become a misogynistic racist in the span of a day. Less snarky criticisms have been leveled at Google's Allo. Experts have called the tech giant out for failing to equip Allo with end-to-end encryption, thereby exposing chat conversations to third parties.

The most satisfying bots are ones with clear uses, such as the Whole Foods one on Messenger that prompts users for an ingredient then offers recipes, or the Sephora bot on Kik that offers beauty tips based on skin type. One of users' big problems with bots is knowing what they can do. Google Allo solves that with messages that introduce features and capabilities over time. If a query is too much for the bot, it will say the feature isn't available yet, and suggest ones that are. CNN's Messenger bot, which was originally designed to answer general questions about the news, often failed to grasp what users were asking.