That fact, shared in the video above with Ben Kosinski,
director of the Collaboratory at iCrossing/Hearst, is part
of one of the most important shifts in modern
marketing & business communications- we're moving
from a world of apps to a world of bots.
Ben would know. As director of the Collaboratory, his
job is to scout new technologies with an eye to helping
Hearst properties better understand and adapt to trends
in consumer behavior. Before that, he was the founder
and CEO of Sumpto, an early influencer network that
helped brands connect with influential college students.
For millennials and younger, messaging has become the
key communication experience. It's fast, direct, visual,
and allows for multiple conversations to happen in
parallel. If one needs any evidence of how important
messaging services are, one need look no further than
Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook's $19 billion dollar
acquisition of WhatsApp, a direct competitor to its own
messenger service.
While businesses (especially marketers) have adapted
to social media as a communication channel with
consumers, they're only just starting to understand how
to use messaging. One of the low hanging fruits is
customer service.
A huge volume of customer service issues are questions
that have been asked or issues that have come up
numerous times before. While numerous companies
have tried to create public customer service forums that
allow people to browse previous issues, the reality is
that people like being able to ask their specific question
and get a direct response. What they don't like is
having to make a phone call and wait on hold.
Digital Genius is a startup that uses artificial
intelligence to improve the customer service process.
The company indexes information about previous
support inquiries and customer satisfaction with
answers to surface possible answers to current
problems. Human agents can then select between or
modify suggested answers, combining the best of AI-
based automation and the personal human touch.
Another early incarnation of the customer service use
case are companies allowing users to text message
businesses. Before it was acquired, social networking
app Path had begun to emphasize this use case. Yelp
also rolled out business messaging tools, which seem
like a natural extension of the companies reviews.
Yet if customer service is an obvious area for
businesses to take advantage of the text interface, many
are betting that the future is even bigger than that, and
that that future is bots.
Bots are intelligent systems that sit on top of messenger
services and can be programmed to interact with
customers in different ways.
One type of bot are automated intelligence bots that can
recognize certain keywords in messaging channels to
initiate a process. Breakout business messenger
platform Slack made waves when it announced an $80
million dollar fund to invest in these type of
integrations. Some of these integrations will be for
existing companies. A quick hackathon at Uber for
example created an Uber Slack bot where users can
simply type "/uber" with a short list of commands to
book a ride without leaving the messenger. Typing "/
uber estimate to" and the address will give you a fare
and time estimate for that particular trip. Another
example of this is Envoy, a reception desk application
that can now use a Slack bot to notify employees when
people have arrived for meetings.
These type of bots show how messengers can become
an actual business operating system. The lightweight
integrations allow users to get the benefits of
interacting with dozens of specialized individual apps
with minimal context switching.
This idea of lightweight interactions also is at the heart
of another use case for messenger bots: interacting with
customers in new real-world settings. One of the
challenges of mobile for business to date is that every
true native experience for mobile has required an app
download. This creates a significant barrier to entry for
a new user, meaning that the experience the brand is
offering has to be extremely desirable. Solutions like
QR codes haven't made a dent, as they still lead to
clunky user experiences outside the norm of what
consumers want.
App bots could solve all that by automating brand
experiences directly from inside the apps where users
are already spending their time. In a post sharing the
company's focus on bots, Kik founder & CEO Ted
Livingston used the theoretical example of ordering a
beer at a ball game. Option one: download an app, sign
up, add a credit card, browse a menu, order, confirm.
Option two: pop open your normal messenger & send a
message to the stadium saying "2 beers." The stadium
could then ask any additional info ("Corona or coors?"
"What's your seat number") and you're done. The bot
interaction is much closer to our existing habits and
behaviors, and that's what makes it so appealing.
We're just at the beginning for bots, but as mobile
habits consolidate around a few key messenger
platforms, they're an area that marketers and businesses
at large are going to have to familiarize themselves
with.
Bots offer brands a truly native way to interact with a
new generation of mobile consumers. Many are
predicting that Facebook will announce a bot
marketplace at their upcoming F8 developer conference
in April. Whether or not this comes to pass, bots are
part of a new interface for business and smart
companies are going to figure out their messenger
strategies sooner rather than later.
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