Do you know how bad bots will hamper your online business and disrupt legitimate traffic? This blog focuses on bad bots and how they affect e-commerce websites.

Generally, an e-commerce website will have many casual website visitors. If you see a sudden spike in website visitors and site traffic, you should check whether they are legitimate users or bad bots.

Artificial intelligence in e-commerce is astounding to every online business owner. Chatbots and their ability to give a human touch to a conversation are one of the best examples of AI.

Talking about the exceptional specifications of chatbots moreover, it is also significant to build a bot carefully. Bad bots are untrained bots that hamper the brand image and put the online business at risk.

Identifying the mistakes in bad bots and rectifying them is not a very big deal! Chatbots just need regular updates and evaluation. If you are planning to build an AI bot to optimize your website, make sure you test your chatbot regularly. For Online business owners, it is necessary to make sure that it is not becoming a bad bot!

Overview of the Content

Responding with Wrong Information

Poor CRM Integration

Not Connecting to Human Agents

Inability to Understand Customers’ Questions

Unsupervised Chatbots

Unclear Business/Sales Strategy

Poor Customer Experience

Not Updating Frequently

Not Analyzing Frequently

What are Good Bots on a Website?

Artificial-powered chatbots will mimic human behavior and develop conversations with customers. AI chatbots find patterns in customer conversation and help e-commerce business owners detect potential customers. However, bad bots will steal sensitive information and generate malicious bot traffic for your site.

AI chatbots on an e-commerce website help e-commerce site owners automate difficult tasks. Automated tasks using AI bots are simpler and more effective. A good AI chatbot on your e-commerce website will have a developed human persona and develop e-commerce sites with exceptional functionalities. Not all bots are bad bots, so online business owners should check malicious bots’ activities to eliminate them from their websites.

How to Detect Malicious Bots

Bad bots on your e-commerce website will spam the emails of your organization. If you have a spam bot on your website, it will send repetitive messages to everyone and share sensitive data with users. There are many factors to determine a malicious bot activity, such as:

  • Automatically installs the virus on your e-commerce site.
  • Sends spam messages to every user.
  • Sharing repetitive conversations with users instead of having casual conversations.
  • Creates fake accounts and adds more reviews.

Many bad bots will also disrupt a site’s value by content scraping. Content scraping on the website will reduce authority and credibility. If an online website has duplicate content by content scraping.

What is Bad Bot Traffic?

When an online website has more organic traffic, it will generate more revenue. Many online business owners use different strategies to generate organic traffic on their websites. Bad bot traffic is nonhuman traffic generated on the e-commerce website.

Bot traffic on your website will disrupt organic website traffic and spam both clicks and impressions. Bad bot traffic is one of the major risks for online business owners since it will hamper Google Analytics.

Bad Bots are Dark Bots!

AI-powered chatbots and their internal functions are intricate. Building an AI chatbot by considering its complex mechanisms and testing it regularly can reduce errors in future conversations.

E-commerce websites are using chatbots to replace multiple tasks done by human agents. Artificial intelligence and machine learning tune an AI chatbot with NLP (Natural Language Processing. The conversation of chatbots can go wrong without proper testing and training.

Bad bots have two risky characteristics in a conversation that can jeopardize your healthy relationship with customers. Bad bots can be overconfident about their racist, misogynistic comments, and bots without proper training can converse with rude comments to customers’ texts.

This is why you must absolutely focus, especially with a new bot, on training it to suit your customer needs, by testing it and updating it regularly.  It’s kind of like teaching a child not to say bad words. Also, a bad bot will share the most sensitive information with users along with malicious links.

The inappropriate conversation is one of the risks but there are also many mistakes to rectify in a chatbot before setting it up!

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9 Common Mistakes to Rectify in AI Chatbots

1. Responding with Wrong Information

Accuracy is essential when passing information to your customers. Most customers converse with a chatbot to avoid browsing about product specifications and information because they want a more “human” experience. Chatbots learn from the data and respond to the customers about the products quickly. If chatbots respond with wrong information, your brand can lose its credibility swiftly! The bad bot does not provide more resources about a question (i.e. no links to blog posts or guides that cover the topic of the question)

To avoid bad chatbots messing up the conversation, it is important to check your chatbot’s conversation and interactions regularly.

2. Poor CRM Integration

Chatbots integrated with customer relationship management systems can ease up tasks efficiently. Popular CRM (Customer Relationship Management) systems like Zoho, Freshdesk, and Salesforce integrated with AI Chatbots complete the tasks fast by collecting relevant information about the customers from the conversation patterns. AI chatbots with CRM integration simplify the data entry without complex navigation to collect customer purchase insights. Chatbots with poor integration cannot access the data and hamper conversations with irrelevant questions. Not integrating the chatbots properly with CRM systems can result in:

  • Irrelevant information about the customer conversation
  • Inefficiency in transferring the information to the customer relationship management
  • Poor CRM integration can lead to the loss of sales opportunities.

3. Not Connecting to Human Agents

AI chatbots with machine learning technology understand and analyze human language with NLP to replicate human speech. Customers can easily converse and get the proper information in a chatbot conversation but at the same time, they would like to get connected with a human agent.

Some chatbots can allow customers to chat with a human agent to resolve problems outside of the chatbot’s ability. If an AI chatbot continues the conversation even after the customers prefer to talk with a human agent, customers might get frustrated!

Related: What is HITL (Human-in-the-Loop) in AI Chatbots?

4. Inability to Understand Customers’ Questions

Chatbots with artificial intelligence can answer questions that are already learned and programmed, and their learning increases with use. Rule-based chatbots, on the other hand, are enabled with a set of rules to answer the common questions of the customers. When a customer comes up with an uncommon question about a product or service, chatbots should be able to answer it, and typically AI chatbots are better at this than rule-based chatbots. The bad bot doesn’t ask a question that’s appropriate for the page (i.e. bot asks the greeting question on the checkout page when it should ask a question that covers questions about checkout on the checkout page).

AI chatbots with machine learning technology can understand the uncommon questions of customers compared to rule-based chatbots. Training a chatbot from the customers’ perspective is significant to avoid errors or misunderstandings.  Customers will leave the site to browse a service if a chatbot takes too long to respond to their questions, or answers them incorrectly.

5. Unsupervised Chatbots

Artificial intelligence and machine learning cannot act alone! Many believe that AI can outpace human agents with deep and active learning, but that’s a ways off. The blatant truth is that artificial intelligence cannot tackle every problem without human intervention. AI chatbots for e-commerce websites are a good idea but human intervention makes the chatbots perform better.

Unsupervised chatbots can jeopardize customer relationships with your brand; human supervision is necessary to check the customers’ needs and train the bot for future conversations.

6. Unclear Business/Sales Strategy

Bad bots with poor sales strategies do not recommend products with upselling and cross-selling strategies on e-commerce websites. Online business owners should set the business objective before training the chatbot: chatbots without a clear business objective cannot ask the right questions to the customers.

Lead generation bots in B2B businesses should ask clear lead qualifying questions to invite prospects. If a bad bot asks irrelevant questions to a potential client without any business objective, the client might lose interest in purchasing products.

7. Poor Customer Experience

One of the main reasons for using chatbots on websites is to enhance customer experience. A good customer service experience will pave the way for new customers to visit your website. An example of a good customer service experience in chatbots is Ochatbot, which allows the customers to ask specific questions and helps them add the product right to their cart from the chatbot window.

Poor customer service in bad bots pushes the customers away from purchasing your products and can lead the customer away from your site. Sentiment analysis is one of the advanced technologies in chatbots that make the machine better understand emotive questions.

8. Not Updating Frequently

Artificial intelligence is not perfect, AI needs updates constantly to improve its conversation. Conversational Commerce with AI chatbots can fail if online business owners are not ready to understand their customer’s questions through failure to update chatbots frequently.

AI chatbots without regular updates can find it difficult to interpret user intent and messages. Personalizing product recommendations to customers is a unique specification in AI bots- irregular updates can make chatbot conversations boring or frustrating!

9. Not Analyzing Frequently Asked Questions

A definite set of rules in AI chatbots can help them in resolving users’ requests. Effective chatbots should analyze previous conversations and frequently asked questions to understand customer behavior.

Bad bots’ involuntary response comes from not analyzing frequently asked questions and following the improper set of commands, and this typically happens when a chatbot is not updated regularly.

Final Word :

Bad bots will not only disrupt the functionalities of your website, but they will also reduce trust and credibility. If you are planning to implement an AI chatbot on your website, you should check its functionalities before launching it.

AI chatbots are the best solutions to automate your manual tasks and increase revenue on your e-commerce website, but you should implement an effective AI chatbot.

Artificial intelligence is ultimately expected to outpace humans in answering questions fast and processing the data quickly but it can never work alone or improve without rectifications. Many successful companies have built chatbots and failed in their experiments by letting them work alone!

Also Read: 5 Common Mistakes to Avoid with Your Shopify Chatbot

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Frequently Asked Questions 

1. What are lead-qualifying questions a good chatbot can ask?

Lead-generating, also known as lead-qualifying, chatbots can ask more questions about how the customer got to know about the product/service. Chatbots can understand what a customer is looking for by asking this and related questions. Lead-nurturing chatbots should try to help the customers reach out to people by scheduling meetings through questions.

2. Why did the Tay chatbot fail in 2016?

In 2016 Microsoft introduced an experimental chatbot known as Tay chatbot became a bad bot when it was trained on Twitter, where it absorbed everything, including racist and misogynist tweets. Without proper programming, Tay started imitating their Twitter followers. Through Tay chatbot’s bad deeds, we quickly learned the importance of human supervision in artificial intelligence.

3. How AI Chatbots are effective?

In a nutshell, chatbots, especially AI chatbots, can improve your sales, business efficiency, and costs of operation with regular training. Artificial intelligence in an effective chatbot is only as good as it is training. It is important for any business to regularly test and update chatbots.  In this way, you will know how your chatbot is interacting with customers. E-commerce site owners will be able to spot problems early so that a bad chatbot experience is quelled early. AI chatbot doesn’t harm your brand’s reputation with regular updates.

4. What are sophisticated bots?

Sophisticated bots are advanced chatbots with artificial intelligence technology. Sophisticated bots will replicate human behavior and talk with human users in real time. Advanced chatbots will have both machine learning and artificial intelligence technologies behind them.

5. What are internet bots?

Internet bots are computer programs that run automated tasks on the internet. Internet bots will help in automating messages and reducing human agents’ work.

Greg Ahern
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