EE's chatbot struggled to understand "EU roaming" request
Yesterday I caught this fascinating post from Martin Hill-Wilson on LinkedIn.
As the founder of Brainfood, Martin is something of a customer experience expert, speaking regularly at conferences internationally about the importance of CX.
In his post, he narrates his frustration trying to get EE's chatbot to do anything useful beyond send him "I didn't understand" replies.
EE, for the uninitiated, is one of the largest providers of telecoms and mobile services in the UK with a whopping 25M customers. They're also part of larger conglomerate, BT.
Martin was trying to buy a roaming add-on for his daughter's upcoming 10-day trip to Italy and trying to find a fix, and eventually ended up with the EE chatbot.
It was not an ideal experience, as the phrase goes.
Martin explains:
Got bored waiting. Went on site to be invited into a WhatsApp session which I thought might be a quicker route. Of course it was front ended with a bot. The interaction is captured below in the image showing 'dumb and dumber' in action.
He continues:
Nothing weird about my language and request. In fact used EE's language. Yet the bot reset 3 times on the simplest of tasks in a channel that had presumably been optimised for that task since it was embedded on the roaming FAQ page.
Do have a look at the screenshots that Martin took of the exchanges. It makes for frustrating reading for anyone working in and around the Conversational AI space.
While it is easy to point and laugh (I'm thinking Nelson from the Simpsons with his "Ha Ha" catchphrase) and it's easy to say "wow, they should get better technology", the damage is already done.
Quite apart from the dissatisfaction that Martin faced, this is yet another example of, as he calls it, "the dumb and dumber" of chatbots that are currently being used by brands all across the industry. This does significant damage to the wider marketplace as more and more consumers assume that all "Conversational AI" offerings are next to useless.
This is absolutely not the case.
But when you've got huge, huge globally recognised brands like EE putting stuff like this out in the market, it's difficult not to wince.
Come on, EE. Time for a bit of a step change?
It didn't understand "EU Roaming"?
I'm astonished that EE's chatbot couldn't parse Martin's rather reasonable "need EU roam for one month" statement. He even used low-level simplistic English that even your 1990s PHP-based chatbot can parse.
Surely it could have spotted the phrase "roam" as a keyword? No.
He tried again.
EE Chatbot: "What are you looking to talk about today?"
Martin: "roaming"
EE Chatbot: "I'm sorry, I don't quite understand what you mean..."
Oh dear. He just used one word.
Forget the Lloyds Banking "please use less than 15 words" demand on their Chatbot welcome page, Martin only used one word and it couldn't hack it.
Oh dear.
In the last screenshot, the chatbot – which is affectionally named Bert-EE – actually replied with one word: "Sorry".
Oh no.
Surely someone at EE thought to plugin the keyword "roaming" as some kind of intent and have the chatbot link to some generic ee.co.uk/roaming webpage?
Alas, Martin had to go round in circles.
Let's hope someone at EE decides to press reset on their Chatbot strategy soon.
Perhaps they should be looking at what some of their Nordic colleagues are doing with Conversational AI. They're amongst the most advanced I've seen in telecoms with more or less full orchestration going on, for almost every use case.
Check out Martin's post here:
Martin Hill-Wilson
You can find him on LinkedIn here:
Martin Hill-Wilson
Good luck with the Chatbot --> Conversational AI strategy shift, EE.
Let me know if you need any help!
