CB2’s Gladly-powered support bot handles order tracking and simple product recommendations, but it falls short in several key areas.
Speed matters
One of the first things that customers notice when trying to get AI-based support is the speed of responses. When you’re working with a human, some delay can be forgiven, but there’s really no reason a basic chatbot should take more than a few seconds to come back to you.
That’s one of the first things I noticed with this Gladly setup; it’s super slow. A basic question about the return policy yielded a response in a whopping 36 seconds, while a product recommendation question took 43 seconds. There’s no reason these should take this long!
One of the biggest propositions of AI-powered support is speed, and failing on that front is a true travesty.
Data collection
To even begin a chat, CB2 requires you to enter a name and email. Data collection up front wasn’t necessary for the questions I wanted to ask, so it only served as an additional barrier that could have contributed to drop-off.
Product recommendations
The chatbot was able to provide some basic recommendations for a couch, but after asking it to filter down to some cheaper options it abandoned the task and pushed a newsletter sign-up, despite the site clearly offering cheaper items.
Basic FAQ failure
I tried asking the chatbot what the return policy for couches was, which it somehow couldn’t answer and instead directed me to contact support. Womp womp.
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