Chatbots can’t fix disorganised content

Warning: buckle up people, this one is a bit crunchy.

Recently, I’ve seen organisations using chatbots to “help” their audience find information. In fact, some go out of their way to tell people the chatbot is the fastest way to the relevant content.

I have to wonder - why would you advertise that the content isn’t working rather than fix the actual problem?

If people can’t find things from a search engine, there’s something wrong.

If people can’t find things from your home page, there’s something wrong.

If people can’t navigate to what they want from any page on your site, there’s something wrong.

If you are using this kind of tool to tailor results and hide complexity, lovely. But as a navigation tool?

Look at the journey to a chatbot.

Your audience goes to your site and starts to look for content.

A window pops up (usually obscuring content; so annoying and inaccessible) asking if you want to chat.

If your audience can’t immediately see what they need, they may use the chatbot. Given it’s covering half the content, this might seem like a good option - or at least, the one you should be using. After all, it’s there taking up prime real estate for a reason, right?

But usually, the chatbot is there for less altruistic reasons.

I am not against finding information quickly and efficiently. But this seems like adding another layer that doesn't need to be there. It's not doing the hard work so that your users don't have to. It seems to me that quite often a chatbot is there because there's no content strategy, or because there is a human problem. A relationship or power problem. Let’s look at some possibles.

It’s a governance problem: too many people publishing too many things

Often organisations will publish multiple pages covering the same sort of need in slightly different ways because of power problems. Duplicate content is often there because somebody, somewhere in the organisation, won't tell people to stop publishing.

There’s usually no content strategy (or if there is, it’s not being used), and no desire to have tricky conversations - even if they would benefit the audience. After all, the audience isn’t in work every day glaring at you from the kitchen because you told them they couldn’t have their content.

So an easy solution? Add a chatbot to sort through the content for you. Kitchen glarers are happy. Publishers are happy. And the audience… are they happy?

It’s a silo problem: no-one knows (or cares?) what anyone else in the organisation is talking about

We all understand that we work in teams and there are many very good reasons for that.

Silo working doesn’t happen because we work in teams. It develops when these teams work more like empires or little fiefdoms. When we are all running at goals and targets or just doing the work, we often don’t look up and over the castle walls. And you can’t fix something if you are not even looking.

Chatbots don’t have teams. They patrol the whole website, finding content in all the nooks and crannies. So you can have your content and eat it too. Everyone is happy, and the chatbot will find all the content. And you don’t need to spend time getting to know it over a coffee.

But what about your users? Don’t you need to get to know them a bit?

It’s an ego or fear problem: “we must publish something because they have/we are better”.

This can be internal or external. Your fiefdoms may want to do their thing because they think they are better, either than their colleagues or another organisation.

I once worked somewhere where 8 different departments put out Hallowe’en recipes. Some were the exact same recipe. Think of all the time and effort that was wasted. And if they’d done their research, they would have known from the data that no-one was coming to the site for Hallowe’en recipes anyway.

But even if you were looking for baking inspiration, you don’t want to be reading multiple versions of the same pumpkin pie recipe. So whose recipe do you go with?

Why make a decision when you can make a chatbot. Then you can have all the recipes and other “just in case” content you want. The chatbot will wade through it all.

It’s a lack of proper strategy problem: “We publish EVERYTHING for transparency”

Sweet mercy. Some of this is for legal reasons and I get that. But publishing literally everything on a website is never useful. It also shows you don’t know your audience.

I strongly believe that most information is useful and interesting to someone. But you need to know who that someone is and what they are doing. You have to be on the channel they are on, and at the right time.

You may well have niche information that only 5 people want. Those 5 people aren’t irrelevant but find out about them. What do they need?. It’s maybe a forum post. Or a newsletter. It’s not the 500th page on your site no-one looks at and clogs up search.

Have a proper archiving policy. No-one wants to see your press release from 20 years ago instead of the thing you are doing now. Structure your content. Link to the old docs, sure, or give the pertinent information from 20 years ago in the new thing.

But don’t keep everything forever and then let your chatbot do the hard work. Because guess what. The chatbot is going to struggle too. As much as we might like to think of it like a tiny goblin-esque creature, living in the basement somewhere and feeding off ancient press releases, it doesn’t actually work that way. Instead, it’s being slowly buried under endless, out of date content that means it can’t search any better than the real person at the other end can.

Assistive technology

There’s another problem with chatbots, and that’s around their accessibility. Chatbots often completely disable our audience. I asked our content designer Jack about this. They said chatbots can cause problems for everyone, but in particular people who use:

• high zoom, and may not know they are in a chat window or may lose other functions they needs, like "find",
• screen readers, who may be interrupted when new content arrives in the chat window.

A chatbot is not a fix-all

Your chat function is not the prompt point for a journey. It’s not a solution. Sorting your content is the solution.

Chatbots might be all lovely now but without fixing the underlying problems, they will eventually be as pointless as the existing navigation.

Bad search results are never a tech problem. They are a people problem. Search often fails purely because there is too much content. It’s not a search problem. There’s nothing wrong with the tech. It’s the organisation.

Using a chatbot is like saying: we know you won’t be able to find what you want easily but we have too much internal fighting going on so here’s something to paper over all the cracks to get you to where you need to go. We’ve given it a cute name and it’s very apologetic.

We might ask if you like it and it helped, but actually, we probably don’t want to know.

Some organisations say that they don’t have time for discovery and they don’t have the money for user research. But they seem to find the time and money for hundreds of pages of useless content. And now, for a chatbot to trawl it.

Told you this one was crunchy.

This blog post was sparked by my LinkedIn post "Use the chat function to help you find information faster."