The first thing to understand about chatbots is that most won’t introduce new capabilities; instead, brand chatbots will centralize where and how customers engage, using social media as an operating system.
Consumers will engage with bots in three ways: content consumption, customer service and productivity or transactional engagements. Social media is already part of many of these activities between brands and consumers, but social media acts as a gateway to direct consumers to the brand website, blog or separate channels. Instead of using social media as a portal, consumers can read and receive information, ask technical questions and even make purchases from one chatbot.
Take for example customer support. More than one-third of customers already prefer using social media rather than the telephone for customer support, and most consumers expect a response within an hour — if not faster. That’s a taxing load for brands, but the enhanced AI through chatbots makes it feasible to accommodate.
This won’t be the painful automated voice response for most phone customer service — which is good news since consumers are increasingly impatient with customer service. Chatbots will be able to quickly understand the contextual request or problem from the customer rather than force them through a series of selection menus to understand the problem.
Many brands already target content on social media to specific audiences and locations, but there is no silver bullet currently to fully personalize what, when and how messages are delivered to customers. Even the current chatbots available on Facebook have room to improve in this department.
Bots should get smarter with more human interaction, and will learn which information individuals really want, and when they prefer to receive it.
While there is no doubt this bot-driven social media system is the future, there is still need for improvements before the bots officially take over. Even beyond the need for improved contextual understanding of when to share updates, there is also no common language or intuitive way to initiate or end chatbot conversations.
Kinks aside, the good news is that artificial intelligence learns, and the more we all experiment — both brands and consumers — the better these tools will become.
Courtesy of TechCrunch
