How do consumers feel about the proliferation of chatbots on the web? A collaborative research project found that 15% of consumers engaged with a chatbot in the last year, and many more reckon they can be helpful.

Why bot? Why not bot?

Over half of consumers say chatbots can help with 24 hour service, instantaneous responses, serving up easy answers and facilitating easy communication.

Conversely, 43% of consumers want to deal with a real-life person. Almost a third of people worry that the bot might make an error. And, about a quarter of people reckon bots need better chat skills.

So far, so-so

A list of recently used comms channels was topped by telephone (60%), email (60%), websites (58%). Face-to-face (39%), online chat (38%), mobile apps (30%) and social media (28%) also outranked chatbots (15%).

The research doesn’t discuss it, but those figures bode quite well. Only a fraction of businesses offer chatbots, whereas social media is ubiquitous.

A little over half as many people have used a bot as have contacted a business via social media: that ratio indicates a relatively high uptake of presently available chatbots.

The research report, including a selection of the quantitative responses, is on the SurveyMonkey blog.

What’s your experience with Chatbots? If they’re already getting over half the incoming contact of staffed social media accounts, do you reckon your view might change in the near future?

Photo by Ben Husmann, used under CC license.

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