I just returned from the excellent Conversational Commerce Conference. It’s not a big event (just one track over two days), but it is very focused. I heard two excellent success stories on recent bot deployments. I think I need to revise downward my bot-skepticism a bit.
The highlight for me was a fireside chat with Dan Miller, Mitch Lieberman and Chris Messina over what exactly is meant by saying something is “conversational”. It’s a term with multiple meanings, all of which are central to the future of commerce, customer service and, more broadly, how people and companies are going to interact in the future.
Headlines featuring “AI” and “chatbot” have dominated the discussion in the customer service space for the past year. Naturally, it’s tantalizing to imagine a world where no one needs to call a contact center, but the sizzle around AI and chatbots obscures a deeper question: How much customer support can actually be done by self-service? This question has been with us since the earliest web sites and IVRs started to offload the simplest tasks from agents. Each new wave of technology revives the dream that we can eliminate (or drastically reduce) human agents. We can see the current excitement around AI and chatbots as an extension of this long-running dream. Is it different this time? Are we reaching the promised land? Or are we chasing a receding horizon?
Apple announced “Business Chat” in June, staking a claim to a vital piece of the ecommerce landscape: the channel for customer service communication. The product went into live beta this week with about 10 companies participating, and the timing could not be better for Apple. Facebook, their main rival in this field, is bloodied from weeks of bad press over privacy issues.
It’s going to be a big year in the world of contact center and in customer service technology. Will Avaya soar upwards, freshly unburdened from its decade of debt? Will this be the year that messaging platforms from Facebook, Apple and others reach critical mass as a channel for customer service? Will the AI / chatbot hype start to live up to its promise? We’re going to tackle all of those topics in the months ahead on this blog, but first we’re reading everything we can so we can bring you the most accurate analysis. Below are some of the reports that we have found most interesting.
The IVR experience (“press 1 for this… press 2 for that…”) has long been part of the contact center. Although it serves an important purpose, it is universally detested. Many people see chatbots as a natural replacement for the core functions of the IVR.
Ok, let’s face it; the age of robots is now. As businesses automate their sales and support teams, chatbots and other AI programs are becoming increasingly popular. So, if you’ve been living under a ROCK and need a refresher, please allow me to explain chatbots in layman’s terms. A chatbot is a computer program that automates certain tasks by chatting with customers through a conversational interface, like Facebook. Chatbots give brands from any industry the ability to engage with customers on a personal level. It’s actually super cool.
The “chat” style of communication, where two parties type text back-and-forth, is wildly popular with consumers. Companies are eager to embrace this popularity because A) it’s smart to communicate in a way your customers like and B) it’s less costly than call center agents.
