Your chatbot is driving customers away (and you probably don't even know it)

There's this weird chatbot craze happening right now. Every company seems to think they need one—like they're collecting trading cards or something. And sure, they're all super polite and friendly, but God, are they useless. 

You know the drill. You land on a site and BAM—instant popup: "Hi there! How can I help you today?"  So you bite. You explain your problem, give them all the context, maybe even hand over some personal details. And then what happens?  "Sorry, I can't help with that. You'll need to call customer service."  Great. Thanks for nothing. Now I get to explain the whole thing AGAIN to some poor human who has zero clue what I just went through with their bot. 

Here's a crazy idea: what if the bot actually passed along what we talked about? Like, to your CRM or whatever? Wouldn't that be novel? 

These bots have the memory of a goldfish 

The real kicker isn't that the bot can't help—it's that nobody thought this through. When should it jump in? What can it actually do? What happens when it inevitably fails? 

If I'm logged into your app or customer portal, your bot should know who I am. It should pull up my account info, my order history, something. Instead, it treats me like we've never met. I mean, come on. I'm literally logged in. I'm not some random person wandering in off the street. 

Fast, cheap, and terrible for your customers 

Look, I get it. These quick-and-dirty chatbot solutions are tempting. Everyone else has one, they're cheap to deploy, and your boss probably asked about it in last week's meeting. But here's the thing—unless your bot actually connects to your other systems and has a real plan for handing things off to humans, you're just making your customer experience worse. You're not saving money; you're burning goodwill. 

Mark my words: we're going to see a bunch of companies quietly kill their bots over the next year. Usually right after some executive tries to use their own system and realizes how awful it is. 

Don't be that company 

Want to avoid the chatbot graveyard? Ask yourself these questions before you launch: 

• Does your bot know who returning customers are? 
• Can it actually understand what people are asking for? 
• Does it connect to your phone support, email, everything else? 
• When it hands off to a human, does that person know what happened? 
• Do you actually know what problems it should solve? 
• Are you tracking whether it's working (resolution rates, drop-offs, handover frequency)? 

If you answered "no" to any of these, your bot isn't ready. And honestly? That's fine. Better to not have one than to have a bad one. Right now we're drowning in half-baked bots. They're cheap to build and expensive to experience. Before you jump on the bandwagon, ask yourself: do we actually need this thing? And if the answer is yes, build it right. If you can't build it right, do everyone a favor and don't build it at all.