Chatbots: Like a cold shower in the middle of the Canadian winter

Chatbots are all the hype! Given the cost of call centers, the popularity of live chat and the fact that the communication passes through computers on both ends, it makes sense that businesses would want to provide automated support to their current or future clients.

Bots may be the future, but so far my experience as an implementer and as a user has felt like taking a cold shower in the middle of the Canadian winter. It’s been highly unpleasant.

As statistics about customer satisfaction of bot support are anecdotal to non-existent, the quest for answers has lead me to look at why people prefer chat over other channels. From there, we can draw a few conclusions about what’s missing, and what it means for the future of bots.

What will it take to make bots feel like a cup of hot chocolate in front of a fireplace, after a couple of hours of shoveling snow in the cold Canadian winter?

What can the audience expect to learn?

There is a lot of discussions around chatbots. This presentation discusses the place of chatbot in post-sale/customer support. It explores use cases (customer support journey) and goes beyond the hype by comparing the needs live chat support vs . There is a link to DITA and the role of semantics/structured content.

Meet the presenter

France Baril, owner of Architextus Inc., is a DITA/XML consultant as well as a documentation architect who helps organizations analyze their content and processes, select and develop tools, and learn about DITA and/or XML. She has a unique background with a BA in Communication from University of Ottawa and a BSc in Computer Science from University de Sherbrooke.