When will a chatbot be perfect??

Conversation between brands and consumers initiated in social media is undergoing a metamorphosis. This is driven by rising customer expectations, message personalization and concern for brand reputation online. This change will involve the transformation of social marketing into conversation marketing, which will be driven by solutions based on chatbots.

The key to conversion in the coming years will be reliable conversation and meeting customers’ expectations, which are growing every year. The main tool for conversational marketing will be the popular and well-known worldwide communicators. Data collected back in 2016 by Twilio shows that 66% of customers prefer to contact the brand in this form. The popularization of this channel brings with it the need to change the communication into a more comprehensive, individualized and accessible one. It can be described as “botsization”, i.e. the widespread use of so-called. chatbots. These are computer programs designed to converse and interact with consumers. In the next 2 years this trend will gain momentum. According to a survey conducted by Oracle, 80% of global brands will introduce this type of customer service solutions by 2020, while 36% have already done so. Gartner predicts that by 2021 half of all companies will spend more money on creating chatbots than on developing and building traditional mobile applications. Bots are mainly supported by their versatility, accessibility and saving time and effort.

Versatility

The development of NLP technology. Natural Language Processing (NLP), on which chatbots are based, allows for its use in many areas and industries, including.in. e-commerce, recruitment, automotive, finance or insurance industries. The potential of this type of solution is particularly developmental for sales. Bots, based on the user’s answers to a few simple questions, can recommend a product and provide tips on its use, guide the customer through the process of ordering or finding e.g. a. of an optimal connection via instant messenger. It is also not a novelty that with a few questions a chatbot is able to make an online transfer.

Accessibility, saving time and effort

Improving communication with the consumer in the face of boticization will primarily address customer service in a broad sense. Bots could be the answer to increasing customer annoyance with call centre contacts. Eliminating long call wait times is half the battle to having a successful conversation. Text communication can be conducted simultaneously with an unlimited number of customers, which already guarantees time savings. It becomes obligatory to provide customer service 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Intelligent automatic assistant quickly and effectively collects basic information about a given problem, categorizes it and solves the problem on its own, if it does not require more analysis or additional translation. It takes fractions of a second to route and prioritize an issue to the right cell phone. Traditional call center will become only a center for solving difficult and rare cases. This will result in unprecedented savings in customer service. According to Gartner forecasts signaled already in 2011, within the next 2 years as much as 85% of contacts with customers will take place without a human factor.

Hyper-personalization

Conversational marketing is going to be dominated by the so-called “conversational marketing”. hyper-personalization. Using a customer’s first or last name is just the first step to getting their attention. The second step would be to individualize the message tailored to the consumer’s needs. 58% of respondents to The State of the Connected Customer5 survey identified personalized attention as an extremely important factor in influencing purchase decisions. 57% of those surveyed said they are willing to share private data with companies that offer them a personalized experience in return. What’s more – as many as 52% of respondents would resign (or consider resigning) from a brand that makes no effort to personalize communication with them. Customer information will be the basis for creating this form of marketing. A scenario in which a bot has access to a customer’s purchase history, complaints or comments and, based on machine learning mechanisms, creates a personalized conversation will be the essence of conversational marketing.

Summary

The challenge for companies that invest in conversational marketing will be to properly train consultants or external agencies. Sales will move to a hitherto unknown level, which will be the finalization of transactions through messengers. Chatbots will become increasingly popular in the next 2 years and will be used for many management and sales processes. As technology evolves, they will become better at mimicking a real human conversation. Gartner predicts that in the next few years, the statistical Internet user will talk to a bot more often than to his/her own spouse.