The Marketing Opportunity for Chatbots and Virtual Assistants
The way that customers and consumers interact with businesses and brands continues to change as one-way traffic evolves into the much-vaunted “conversation.” That’s thanks to the rise of chatty virtual assistants and bots who can help any type and size of business engage with their audience. A marketing team’s aim in life is to get the best possible understanding of the customer and optimise the marketing dollars they spend on the highest value methods of interaction that produce the best return on investment. The same story has been true through the newspaper/radio/TV and web era. But now, rather than engage through surveys, in-store opportunities or contests, via the negative drag of customer support or the anonymity of sales data, customers are increasingly talking to brands on a daily basis. The rise of virtual assistants and chatbots create ways for regular ad hoc or structured engagements that can provide marketers with
How Human Does Your Bot Need To Be? Science Says Not Much!
Recent research suggests that going for the all-singing, trying-to-be-friendly, almost-human bot isn’t the best way to go for most use cases. So, just how much banter or empathy should your bot show? That’s a key design decision to make when building chatbots. Bots can express themselves in three basic ways, They can deliver the basic information that any user needs to know. They can emulate the nature of the brand (be that as a chatty character with a sense of fun or gravitas as required) or they can feign interest and emotion in the user’s wellbeing, their day or other aspects to broaden the interaction. When deciding to build a bot, your team might think that sticking to the basics is the best way forward, at least for a first bot. And that instinct is backed up by the U.S. Media Effects Research Laboratory that works alongside Pennsylvania State University’s
Machine Learning, Chatbots and AI March Into Business Use
The hottest tech trends have exploded out of betas, labs and trials into everyday use cases for many businesses, with a raft of new products or developments. If your business isn’t looking to take advantage of ML, AI and bots, it may not be in business for much longer. Every aspect of business will be transformed in some way by machine learning (ML) and AI. For example, bots are already taking over in human resources with the likes of TalView using ML to find candidates and using AI during the interview process. Other AIs, like Swedish recruitment robot Tengai are being used to help provide fair and unbiased interviews to avoid discrimination, an increasingly vital part of the hiring process. If these smart systems can help get better quality recruits in the door, it can have an impact on literally any area of your business, no matter what the market.
How Social Media Chatbots Are Changing Brand Marketing
The rise of chatbots continues across the digital business world, helping startups address huge audiences without the cost of staffing or the hassle of outsourcing. Chatbots enable educational institutions and support charities to connect to students and their users in a neutral voice about all sorts of subjects. For many, it is easier to obtain sensitive information from a chatbot than from a person. But the biggest leap and change is in how brands and their consumers engage as chatbots become the voice of choice for products, services and goods. Social media as a service over the last decade has given brands massive scope to reach out and engage an audience. But the idea of ‘having a conversation’ never really took off despite the marketing hype and the likes of Facebook and Twitter urging that it was the way forward. Instead, tweets, pictures and posts have been shared to the
How to Become a Virtual Travel Agent
Technology like cloud services and chatbots can help you build a virtual travel agent, with fewer of the overheads that such businesses required in the past. This allows you to focus on offering unique travel packages, create a better personal service while focusing on growing a hyper-local or globe-spanning business, whatever you feel the need to provide. The digital business era is an exciting time for all types of company in any market. Now, banks can exist entirely online, while your local coffee shop or bar uses an app to speed up ordering and improve loyalty. Even local and regional travel agents now do the majority of their business online, and new startups can use the power of technology to build their brand and attract customers. Using cloud services, a startup can scale up faster than any traditional business ever could, hiring online freelancers or subscribing to automatic tools to
Can Sex Chatbots Be Dominant?
Can sex with a chatbot ever be rewarding? With humans always having the upper hand, the creation of a sexually dominant chatbot seems fundamentally impossible.
The 2019 A to Z of Chatbots
Chatbots might be a new technology to many, but they are already a key tool for huge numbers of businesses, providing increasing value to their customers with useful information. Rather than take the grand tour of product brochure pages, here are the key terms to consider when looking for a chatbot suite or tool to build your creations. Artificial Intelligence is a major buzzword. Chatbots don’t need AI to succeed, but boy does it help. AI helps bots better understand the questions put to them by users through natural language processing analysis of the text to discern key phrases. AI can also provide smart searches of wider information sets to help provide answers to more open-ended questions that a simpler bot might not understand. Business use cases for bots are growing, from the established basics like customer service and taking bookings to a growing range of sales and upselling from
Top Chatbots and Lessons You Can Learn
More chatbots were launched in 2018 than all the previous years of their existence, and 2019 will see even more arrive. Here are some of the highlights and issues raised from the recent crop, and lessons that any business can use when putting their future chatbot plans together. If NASA can’t make a smart chatbot, then who can? In 2017, with plenty of hype about interplanetary Mars rovers and new landers, NASA launched “Ask NASA Mars” which has seen plenty of interest recently as the InSight mission gently touched down on the surface of the red planet. Notable for the fact it can be addressed by voice command or keyboard, and through the likes of Alexa. Unfortunately, it is a poor example of a chatbot, merely surfacing stock information or giving the wrong answers to simple questions. With all the excitement of space exploration for a new generation, this is
6 Key Questions Your Business Needs to Answer Before Launching a Chatbot in 2019
Chatbots are a growing trend among businesses, helping with customer services, bookings and sales. But among all the hype any company planning to launch one needs to answer some key questions before committing to a project. Consider these around the boardroom or planning table before taking off. What will we do with our chatbot? Without answering this most basic of questions, there is no point in having a bot. Your team, department or client needs to decide exactly what the chatbot is for, what specific questions it will help answer, or what information it will give out. Once that is answered you can start worry about the many other questions like tone of voice and marketing. Some companies will have a simple decision to make, Pizza Hut’s Facebook Messenger chatbot helps it sell more fast food, simplifying the sales process and reducing the need for apps or phone calls. But
Chatbots to Treat Anxiety and Depression
Nowadays, a major concern of mental health doctors regarding traditional therapeutic approaches (such as visiting the doctor’s office) is that they are confronted with a new phenomenon, specific to our time: the desocialization of their patients, especially the younger ones. Indeed, they grew up in a world where they were much more in contact with screens than previous generations. Thus, they have learned to trust the screens, sometimes more than human beings. However, it is not only young people who find themselves in this situation, since we have now been living for twenty years in a world where the use of computers is commonplace, regardless of age. And when social concerns arise in people who are used to screens, it is difficult to lead them to treatment, because therapy involves a social relationship: the one between the patient and the doctor. This is why new approaches are being invented and
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