Bots account for more than half of all internet traffic – that’s insane, considering there are 5.45 billion daily internet users. Oh, and they’re not useful bots like live customer service chats; they’re malicious bots with the sole objective of ruining our lives. In particular, the lives of business owners.

Below, we’ll explore how bots impact the customer service experience and reputation.

The Rise of Bots in Online Interactions

Online bots are now an integral and fast-growing section of the online ecosystem.

According to Imperva’s report in 2023, bots accounted for nearly 49.6% of all internet traffic, marking a 2% increase from the previous year. It’s estimated we’re now over the 50% mark. Similarly, these malicious bots constituted 32% compared to the 30.2% reported in the year. These range from customer service automation to complex cyberattacks.

The positive and negative consequences associated with the rise of bots in engagements on the internet are profound. The former involves user-friendly bots that can improve consumer service as well as make payments go smoothly. The latter means disruption of operations by dangerous programs, theft of vital personal data, and pain for people who use them. The worst is that these bots can integrate with other cyber attack methods like DDos, making it almost impossible to stop ddos attack attempts.

Customer Experience

Malicious bots often leave customers without realizing their impact on their client experience. Some activities carried out by these types of bots include account takeovers, credential stuffing, and scraping off information, which is capable of undermining good experiences for customers. Without account takeover fraud prevention, the results can be catastrophic.

Degradation of website performance due to bots is one common problem. This may result in slow loading times or even crashes when endless spam traffic is generated by flipping through a site’s servers. It was discovered through an Akamai survey conducted in 2023 that 63% will leave any webpage if it takes more than three seconds to load. Businesses could therefore lose clients because they were met by too many robots.

Inflating web traffic through bot-driven traffic can mess up analytics, making it hard for businesses to understand user behavior correctly to optimize their platforms. This further deteriorates the user experience.

Brand Reputation

The presence of bots can seriously harm a brand’s reputation. A single breach caused by a bot can often result in losing trusted customers whose trust might be hard to win back. PwC’s survey conducted in 2023 showed that around 87% of respondents claimed they would move elsewhere should their personal information not receive enough protection.

Misinformation, phishing attacks, and hijacking accounts are some activities that taint brands. If a customer account is compromised through a bot attack, the user may blame the business for not having secure systems.

Wider damages related to the presence of bots have implications for brand reputation and customer loyalty. Based on what they hear about companies’ problems with bots, potential consumers may decide against buying from such corporations.

The Financial Cost of Bot-Related Issues

Bot attacks impact revenues directly and long-term profitability significantly. Cybercrime worldwide will cost companies over $5 trillion between 2023 and 2025, as per Juniper Research. Most of these losses will emanate from bot-related activities.

Bots can cause financial losses in various ways. For example, bots that engage in fraudulent activities or account takeovers lead to chargebacks, and legal fees, and may entail penalties.

You can notice a decline in customer lifetime value (CLV) as an indirect financial impact of a bot attack. Customers are likely to leave when they are not served well due to issues arising from bot involvement, leading to a loss of future earnings. According to a report by Forrester, 56% of customers will stop dealing with a company because of one bad experience.

Strategies for Mitigating Bot Impact

Given the significant impact that bots can have on customer experience and reputation, businesses must implement robust strategies to mitigate these threats. An effective way is deploying advanced real-time bot management solutions capable of detecting and blocking malicious bot traffic. These use machine learning and behavioral analytics to differentiate between humans and bots.

Another strategy would be enhancing website security with multi-factor authentication (MFA) and CAPTCHA challenges. These measures reduce the likelihood that bots gain unauthorized access to customer accounts, thus ensuring only legitimate users interact with the site. CAPTCHA and MFA might seem annoying to customers, but they’re rapidly becoming one of the best ways to protect data.

The impact of bots on customer experience and reputation is massive – we could have written 5000 words about the impact of them. Brand reputation is increasingly at risk and so is the customer experience. And with each passing day, it seems there are more threats and more ways hackers, bots, whoever they are, have to use against businesses and consumers.