Why are we still seeing such crappy Chatbot experiences from the big players?
I was scrolling through LinkedIn this evening when I came across this post by Nigel Walsh.
In his text, Nigel expresses some degree of frustration at the experience he had with the EE (owned by BT Group) chatbot.
Nigel writes:
Nothing says - we couldn’t care less more than asking me my name and phone number, from my logged in account when you send me a personalised sms to my mobile.
His point is very, very well made.
If you can send me a personalised SMS ("Dear Ewan... etc.") to my mobile phone, why can't your chatbot already know my name when I'm logged in online?
It's a super point Nigel.
And what's more, you're right.
Having typed in his name, the chatbot then wanted to know his mobile phone number, which is the height of nonsense given you and I know this information is RIGHT THERE in the data repositories of EE... but not being surfaced to the chatbot.
It's just not good enough.
Looking at Nigel's screenshot, it looks like the chatbot is one of those bog-standard "Hello 2003" style chatbots that would have been amazing in yesteryear, but in today's world, simply don't cut it.
I don't think it's good enough, at all, to be delivering a standalone chatbot experience to customers nowadays when they are in a logged-in environment where it would ORDINARILY be ultra simple to pass Nigel's name as a parameter.
This is about a billion miles away from the latest agentic-hyperpersonalisation-segment-of-one style approaches that I've no doubt EE's team are talking about.
Just not doing, yet.
Come on EE!
