The future of your product is bigger than a chat window

The distinction between a chatbot and an agent is often explained as one answering questions and the other doing things, which gets at a real difference but doesn’t tell us much about what the customer should see. An agent might use tools to check availability or make a booking, and we still have to decide how someone compares the available rooms and agrees to the price. Calling it an agent doesn’t answer those product questions, and putting it in a chat window doesn’t mean every step needs to be a message.

I would separate what the software can do from how we ask someone to use it. There are tasks where typing a request is easier than finding the right page, and there are decisions where a calendar or a comparison table gives you more clarity than another exchange with an assistant. We should be able to choose whichever helps at that moment, with the same information available to both. Otherwise, we end up deciding how the customer has to work before we have understood what they are trying to do.

A customer’s needs rarely fit as neatly into categories as a business’s catalogue does. A family looking for somewhere quiet enough for a child to sleep, within walking distance of dinner, might struggle to express that through a location filter and a list of amenities. They may not even know which detail will make the difference until they have looked at a few places. Conversation gives them a way to explain the situation, and gives the business a chance to ask something more helpful than asking them to select a category.

When the options arrive, I want to be able to look across them without having to remember what was said three messages ago. Are those prices for the same dates, does one include breakfast, and how far is the cheaper place from where we actually want to be? A comparison that keeps those details together saves the customer from doing that work in their head. The conversation still has a role, particularly when something needs explaining, but it doesn’t have to carry every piece of information on its own.

I also don’t think this needs to happen in a tidy sequence where we finish talking and then start clicking. Seeing the rooms might change what I’m looking for, or the cancellation terms might make me reconsider a place I had already selected. I should be able to ask about that, change the dates myself and continue from there, without the product treating each of those actions as the beginning of a new request.

Putting a chat window beside a website only gets us so far. If I tell the assistant that we need a quieter location, I expect the results to reflect that, and if I then change the dates in the calendar, I expect its next answer to use those dates. It sounds obvious when you describe it from the customer’s side, but it means the conversation and the rest of the product have to work from the same understanding of what I’m doing.

Remembering the conversation is only part of that problem, because a transcript can contain several choices I have already moved away from. I might have asked about three hotels, changed the dates twice and decided that I’m willing to pay more for a refundable room. The product needs to know which of those details still apply, and it needs to show me enough of that understanding that I can correct it. If I arrive at the booking form and have to enter everything again, the assistant has left a large part of the job with me.

That understanding also needs to include what I have actually agreed to. Saying I would prefer a refundable room tells the assistant something about my preference; it does not give it permission to reserve the first refundable room it finds. I want the product to remember what matters without quietly turning something I said while exploring into a decision I never made.

The engineering question I find more interesting than how many steps an agent can complete is what we have taken responsibility for when we remove those steps from the customer’s view. A booking flow might have separate pages for dates, room selection, payment and cancellation terms, and we may be able to make that much easier to get through. We still need to establish the right dates, the current price and what the customer has agreed to, even if they no longer have to visit each of those pages themselves.

Suppose someone agrees to a reservation and the price changes before the booking is submitted. Their agreement was to the earlier price, so we need to show them the change and let them decide again. Or suppose the booking system stops responding just after we submit it, leaving us unsure whether the reservation went through. Telling the customer to try again could create a second booking, which means we first have to find out what happened to the original request.

These are the cases I would use to judge how much of the task an assistant can really handle. A convincing answer is easy to overvalue when everything goes well, while a customer waiting to find out whether they have paid for a room needs a very specific answer. They need to know what has happened, what is still uncertain and whether there is anything they need to do, and we have to make sure the product can establish those facts before asking the assistant to explain them.

I have a similar reservation about treating proactivity as an improvement in itself. If I leave halfway through comparing a few places, being able to return to those choices with my details intact would be helpful. An assistant repeatedly asking me to complete the booking might just be another version of the reminders I already ignore. The fact that it can write a more personal message does not mean I wanted the interruption.

The distinction I care about is whether the assistant is helping me with something I asked it to do. If I ask it to watch for a room within my budget, there is a reason to tell me when one becomes available, although I would still expect to approve the booking unless we had agreed otherwise. If all I did was browse a hotel, there is much less reason to assume I want it following up. How far it should go depends on the task and the agreement with the customer, and I would rather get that right than make doing more on its own the goal.

This becomes more interesting when the person arriving at a business has an assistant of their own. They might browse the website themselves, ask the business a question, or ask their assistant to find a few suitable options before they look at anything. The business still has the same rooms, prices and cancellation rules, but the way someone reaches that information has changed. A customer’s assistant needs to be able to check those details without guessing from a description, just as the customer needs to be able to see what they are buying.

That is the direction we are building towards with Noodle Seed: one shopkeeper for every way your customers shop. I want a business to be able to help someone who walks through its website and someone whose assistant brings it a request, with both getting answers from the same business information. If the customer then opens the website to compare the options or finish a booking, the work already done should still be there. For me, that connection is a large part of what makes this worth building.

For a business deciding where to start, I would pick a customer task we can follow all the way through, such as finding and booking a suitable room, and look carefully at where people still have to do the work themselves. Do they have to repeat their dates, ask someone to explain the price or contact support to find out whether the reservation went through? Those questions tell us more about what needs improving than how many messages the assistant answered. A shorter conversation could be a good result if the customer found what they needed and completed the booking.

When I think about what I want us to build, I come back to that customer who has already explained the trip they want to take. They should be able to see a few relevant places, change their mind after looking at them and know exactly what they have booked by the time they leave. Getting all of that to work together is a much bigger job than adding a chat window, and it is where I think we should be spending our time.