The World of Bots

Bots/Robots are not just human shaped machines that we have seen in some Facebook or Whatsapp video. They could also be just a piece of code trying to be a human in front of the computer. 

With Zillions of websites on the Internet, there are bots going probably into core of every website, every content and probably every discussion or a conversation. Isn't that scary?

It’s scary, because bots can be good or bad. 

Good bots - It’s a multi-billion dollar business to be a good bot. Aggregator companies have become very popular since past few years where the company has no product to sell. The whole business is based on selling products of other companies on their own website and how they do it is using a bot/crawler.

Bad Bots - If your website is not a secure one and is an important one, then there are always people trying to use a bot to try various combinations of ID’s and passwords to hack into the website.  I am sure I don’t have to talk much about this, you see, we have a moral science classes in school, because good needs to be taught, bad comes automatically. So lets talk about the good bots. 

In a lot of banking sites, (as secure as a banking site),  customers themselves provide the ID and password to the bot companies to login an access their information. Is it scary , yes!!! Is it bad for the bank, I say yes !! Is it bad for customer, may be - may be not !!

So, who are these so called aggregator companies? These are well established and very reliable companies with top class security and awesome looking website with all possible options or all possible information at one place. It surely does make the customers life easy !!! But on the other hand hackers don’t have to hack into 5 of your bank websites, they just have to hack into one of your aggregator servers to steal all possible information they can put their hands !!! That's a very pessimistic thinking, I know !!

So, how does it impact the real business???  I say it is a sad story for the business in most ways especially if you are dealing with customers. 

• Customers are people who already have an affinity towards your brand, and when they visit the website, one can use this opportunity to cross-sell their products without any competition and if they don't visit you, but the aggregator then you are now competing with the world in a 300*250 pixel on someone else's website to cross-sell your product. Forget the complex personalization algorithm you are planning to use for targeting.
• These aggregator companies hit your website a lot of times in a day/week/month which seems like unnecessary traffic, as a real human would probably not login everyday. The increased website traffic is a burden to the back end servers, costing you a lot of money on the infra side.
• With aggregators, customers become lazy to login into website, forget their passwords, which costs the organization. They will be able to access little information from aggregators, while for tasks, they will choose a phone or some other costly channel than logging into the website and if you need something from the customer then you also will have to use the costly channel to reach out to them.  

On the other hand, Prelogin aggregators are profitable from marketing perspective. If you are a well established company with a good product, the customers will surely choose you comparing the features of other companies, and if you are a newer company you still get an equal opportunity and a platform to sell with your well established competitors.  

That's on the good bots. The bad bots as I said I don't think I have to talk a lot about, as you know they do the bad stuff. Well, recently came to know about a new kind of bad thing that bad bots do... There are bots that just download your app multiple times and rate them bad just to spoil your business. Never thought of using bots to do something like that !!!