What on earth is chatbot spaghetti?
If you’re deciding to install a chatbot in any kind of sizable organization, you’d better think about it first. The shift of buying power from IT to business means that business units in organisations are being sold applications and tactical chatbot solutions that are great for them but don’t fit into any kind of architecture.
What does this mean?
The business will often come up with something which (quite rightly) suits their exact purpose. But that chatbot will have its own UI, its own supported channels, integrations and even language. Or your contact center will install a live web chat solution which might not support one of those business’s chatbots. Maybe the CEO wants customers to WhatsApp the business, or come through Facebook but those channels don’t work with the live chat solution or, if they do, you’d rather the data wasn’t owned by them because vendor lock-in looms.
The chatbot market is still the wild west – this is a good read:
https://searchcio.techtarget.com/feature/How-to-deal-with-the-lack-of-chatbot-standards
The article talks about companies struggling with multiple chatbot projects and architectures, vendors operating in silos and users getting inconsistent experiences. In it, analyst Ian Jacobs from Forrester says:
“With chatbots, everything is still in the works. There isn’t a super-mature anything that I can point to. It’s still a fairly new field.”
And here’s a coincidence. We’ve had this exact problem at several of our clients, especially the larger ones so we’ve built something to fix it. We call it the Conversational Hub and it’s an open, easily extendable, multi-channel, multi-NLP, multi live chat, multi-integration platform designed to free organisations from chatbot spaghetti.
