The internal audience
The B2C space will see the first and most obvious instances of chatbot implementation, but there are also corporate applications for chatbots. Employee queries are often very predictable. Where do I find my e-payslip? When does pension enrolment start? How do I re-set my password?
All too often hunting down things like payroll information, or finding out how much holiday you have left, involves pursuing an enquiry down long and convoluted channels of communication, even when this information should be relatively easily available.
Chatbots could be an ideal way to overcome employee reluctance to take full advantage of corporate intranets, and reduce the amount of time wasted by IT and HR departments on routine and repetitive queries.
Risks and challenges
While conversational commerce may sound like an evolution of existing systems like Frequently Asked Questions pages, search boxes and customer service lines, the road to a full realization of its benefits is not entirely straightforward:
- It’s early days: while certainly perfectly functional, the technology as it stands is still in its infancy. Most bots currently operate on decision trees, where one response triggers an automatic range of responses – all of which need to be identified and programmed in advance. Full natural language recognition is also still years away, with bots potentially confused by colloquialisms and misspellings in ways humans are not. However, the rapid evolution of AI and machine-learning could soon make bots much more adept at intuiting what us humans probably want or mean.
- Death by spam: an oversaturation of marketing bots could also kill chat as a favored communication channel. One study cites the 98% open rate on text messages (five times that of emails) as a strength – but part of the reason emails are comparatively neglected is because so often they are unwanted marketing emails. Marketers need to be careful to make sure chatbots are things that consumers actually want to engage with, rather than things they actively avoid.
- Chat versus search: some things are already pretty easy to do via a search engine, and a chatbot doesn’t necessarily add that much of a gain in efficiency. In the case of simple tasks like ordering a pizza, typing out an order for a bot rather than just clicking buttons doesn’t necessarily offer sufficiently compelling efficiency savings to be worth the trouble of implementing, or to persuade customers to try the new system.
- Jobs: as with any other disruptive technology, this new technology could lead to job losses. The most obvious at-risk roles could be the thousands of people worldwide employed in call centers and other phone-based positions. Other workers whose roles could be at least partially taken over by automated chatbots include travel and estate agents, as well as certain business functions in HR and IT.
The true potential of chat
However, chatbots need not herald a total handover of control to the robots. The human element won't go away entirely. There are certain nuanced things that you can't predict before the facts.
For example, if someone is going to have a medical procedure, finding out how they need to prepare and the scheduling of that can all be done through a bot. But suppose they want to ask something more complicated, like “Can we combine medical procedures?” and ”If I reschedule the appointment how far do I have to travel?”
These kind of requests aren’t necessarily predictable and will need human interaction. This may a problem never entirely solved by bots alone.
The reason chat can be a better way to interact is not just because it can be more efficient and intuitive, but because it feels more personal. Algorithms working with databases of responses can provide a certain degree of personalization in a way that’s a vast improvement over static web pages.
But if you want to maintain and build customer loyalty, automation, algorithms and analytics can only take you so far. The best, most trusted relationships aren’t just built on conversation, but on a sense that your interests are being truly respected, and that your opinions matter.
Chatbots could be a hugely powerful tool for brands, but engagement is the key word to remember here, not displacement. Chatbots should reduce the friction that slows down a consumer getting to what they need by understanding and anticipating that particular user’s likely needs.
They should not be seen as a way to initiate a wholesale replacement of HR and customer service teams. When it really matters most, the truly personal touch will always trump automated personalization.
Resumen
Chatbots could be a hugely powerful tool for brands. But to build customer loyalty, automation and analytics can only take you so far.
