The signal in the noise

When we started in the chatbot game in 2016, most people had no idea what a chatbot was🤯
Every time we’d get onto a sales call, we’d spend at least the first 30 mins explaining what a chatbot was, let alone why anyone should get one. As if that weren’t enough, in most cases, the customer would leave the call skeptical of the technology’s value🙁

Fast forward to today, and our sales calls look entirely different. In the years since we launched, chatbots have gone from being a niche technology described by many as a gimmick to a mainstay in any self-respecting marketer and customer service manager’s toolkit. Pretty much everyone we speak to knows what a chatbot is, and they know with absolute certainty that they want one😁

Sounds like a happy ending, right?

Well, not exactly.

To be quite honest with you, most of the newfound buzz around chatbots is unfounded. The vast majority of companies looking to implement a chatbot in their customer experience stacks don’t understand what the technology does. They just know that everyone else is getting one, so they want one as well.

This way of thinking about new technologies, chatbots or otherwise, is dangerous.

In most cases, it results in subpar outcomes that alienate people from technology. Think about what happened with Facebook Messenger Chatbots. When they first came out, everyone thought they would be the next big digital platform after apps and websites. Thousands of developers, investors, and businesses rushed to get their Messenger bots to market and unsurprisingly, in this frenzy, most people lost sight of the actual user experience, and the vast majority of Messenger chatbots released in this time period kinda sucked! That’s why few people use messenger bots today.

We don’t want you to fall into this trap, and that’s why we started this podcast😎

We know from our own experience that if done right, chatbots can deliver immense value to your business. The mission of this podcast is our attempt to ensure the “if done right part.” Every week(-ish), we will talk to leaders from around the world of conversational tech about how they are using chatbots to generate leads, answer FAQs, troubleshoot customer service tickets, and entertain audiences. These conversations will contain a healthy mixture of philosophical discussions about whacky, experimental chatbot use cases that we see emerging in the space to actionable tactics that you can test in the field immediately.