Entropia launches whitepaper on chatbots

Entropia Group, the new age consulting-meets-agency offering, has announced the launch of its latest whitepaper: Bot-o-logy, a study on 30 chatbots selected from global and local brands across various industries. The bots have been assessed across 28 parameters in three criteria groups: Reliability, Experience and Personality.

In today’s connected world, it is virtually impossible to navigate the internet without encountering a chatbot – these computer programmes that mimic human conversations, and interact with users through a messaging interface, have changed the face of modern communication and customer care.

The chatbot is often the first point of contact between a brand and its consumers and its purpose varies from answering simple FAQs, providing information, collecting data, tending to customer service, to sales closures.

This research by Entropia aims to provide an analysis of some of the best and worst chatbots in the market today, including those of local brands like Air Asia, Malaysia Airlines, Digi, as well as select international brands like Ford, Shell, Wall Street Journal, Star Wars, Western Union, TGI Fridays, Endurance, and Mitsuko.

Prashant Kumar, Entropia Founder & Senior Partner, said: “A vast majority of bot interactions in Malaysia tend to be deeply frustrating. This brings the fear of the very technology getting discredited. At Entropia we believe doing it right is more important than doing it. This whitepaper is an effort towards that.”

The highest rated chatbot, according to the report, is Mitsuku, a virtual character with a unique personality developed by AIML Technology in Leeds, England.

This chatbot is the most notable high scorer across criteria like Reliability, Experience and Personality as its responses are always speedy and factually correct, it generally operates as if there is a real person behind the chat interface, so there is seldom a need for human intervention.

The lowest scorer, according to the report, is Endurance chatbot, developed primarily to be a virtual companion to the elderly, that performed poorly across most parameters.

Leading the local pack with high scores on many criteria, is AirAsia’s Virtual Allstar (AVA), a good example of how, through integration, a chatbot can provide a seamless experience to its customers in a quick and efficient way.

Sourabh Agrawal, Partner at Entropia commented, “On the home front, although chatbot technology is still relatively new to Malaysia, progressive companies, always eager to innovate and automate, have adopted these online conversation agents as an efficient alternative to improve their customer communications.

“And due to the ever-increasing capabilities of Artificial Intelligence, there is no limit to what chatbots can do today. In fact, there is huge potential for future-focused brands to carefully design and develop their online conversation agents to match different market segments.”

The Bot-o-logy whitepaper is available for download on www.entropia.com/media