The future of customer service is a short conversation

By Ofer Ronen, Chatbase GM

Around six months ago, Chatbase became generally available. In our journey thus far, we’ve processed hundreds of thousands of bots, and billions of messages and intents. Having this data provides a unique window into emerging trends in the rapidly growing conversational analytics industry.

To mark this milestone, we want to share some observations about why people are building conversational interfaces (aka bots), and why some bots are more successful than others.

Virtual agents are finding a place in contact centers 

As the data in the following chart (based on a sample of more than 700 bots in Chatbase that have provided a use case) suggests, bots are becoming particularly popular for customer service and support. This data point mirrors what we see in recent industry research about the growing prominence of virtual agents for customer service. For example:


The range of user engagement is wide 

Our data (the data in this section is based on bots with at least 10,000 messages in 2018) also suggests a broad spectrum of engagement “intensity” across bots in every industry/use case, whether measured by number of turns (median: 2) or session time (median: 24 seconds). Some bots boast at least 14 turns and/or 9 minutes per session, an amazing level of engagement! But as we’ll see below, intense engagement is not automatically a positive.


Sometimes, less user engagement is better

This observation leads to what is perhaps the most valuable insight: More user engagement (measured by number of turns or session time) is often assumed to be a good thing. But in fact, for many uses cases, less is more -- for customer service, for example.

One can score bot use cases based on where they should lie across a spectrum of user expectations about engagement. Most value is found at the edges:


For example, in customer service scenarios, most users will want answers as quickly as possible, with minimal interaction -- they “hate” to have a conversation. At the other end of the spectrum, success for entertainment bots is premised on lengthy sessions with multiple turns -- users “love” to have a conversation. So, the bots that are best at doing each of those things would score very low or very high, respectively.

Using this rubric, we can draw some conclusions about the top-10 bots ranked by number of sessions (and with at least 10,000 messages) in 2018:


The two top-ranked bots do a splendid job of engagement, with medians of at least 5 turns and a few minutes of session time. For a use case that involves coaching or advice, as these do, this is exactly the desired goal. It’s not surprising that these bots top the chart because they do their job well.

Toward the other edge of the engagement scale (for customer support), the third-ranked bot has medians of 3 turns and under 1 minute of session time, but even so achieved a top-5 ranking in session volume. These are the low engagement numbers that we would want to see from a virtual agent, with which most people want to avoid a lengthy conversation.

Context is everything 

Although for the other bots on the list the relationship between function and engagement are less obvious--we’d need to know more about each specific use case--the main takeaway is that this relationship has to be viewed contextually. More engagement is not always better, especially for customer service!

About Chatbase

Chatbase gives builders of conversational interfaces (or bots) sophisticated tools for creating better, and stickier, consumer experiences than ever before--leading to better conversion rates and retention. Chatbase is a cloud service that easily integrates with any bot platform and type, voice or text, and is free to use.

Among other features, Chatbase uniquely relies on Google’s machine learning capabilities to automate the identification of  bot problems and opportunities that would otherwise take a lot of time, leading to faster optimizations and better bot accuracy.

Chatbase is brought to you by Area 120, an incubator for early-stage products operated by Google.









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