Disrupting With Chatbots Is Good, But Chatbot Disruptors Must Tread a Fine Line
The claim that businesses are “disrupting” markets with technology, services and new features like chatbots is getting a bit long in the tooth, but plenty of marketers still want to bang that drum. Consider the wider issues with your planned disruption and whether you need to focus on something other than disruption for disruption’s sake. Look at any business or market these days and there are plenty of thought pieces, industry articles and vendor push about being disruptive, usually through technology. Look at the relatively traditionalist restaurant trade, like this piece on Disruption in the Restaurant Technology Space: “Whilst virtual chatbots and robots taking over the restaurant may sound exciting, it has its own shortcomings. Although Facebook Messenger is a popular chatbot platform, it’s not very reliable in the long run, given the rate at which the popularity of social media platforms changes. Similarly, robots are game-changers for restaurants, however,
How to Ensure Your Chatbot Is a Customer Support Success
From internal IT to big-brand tech services, outages and service failures happen on a daily basis, and always at the wrong moment for some. The key to keeping those colleagues or customers happy is to operate highly visible support and crisis management services that keep people informed without then needing to dig for information or clog up vital phone lines. Across the world, not a day goes by when some big service goes down. Perhaps one that affects us all like Gmail or Netflix, or your mobile service or a critical business cloud tool. You can use a site like DownDetector to see recent examples, and the spikes caused in traffic when people aren’t happy. You might also think this won’t happen to your company, but as digital products and services become more reliant on technology, the chance of a major failure grows. Be it something as simple as a
The Road to Artificial General Intelligence and What it Means For Chatbots
Chatbots and virtual assistants are among the most visible uses of artificial intelligence in its various guises. Now we’re starting on the road to AGI, how will that change how bots operate in the future, and what could it mean for your business. Just as chatbots, virtual assistants and digital concierges get their feet under our tables, Artificial General Intelligence lands with a thud as the next big step in AI. AGI represents intelligence in the form of a bot or assistant that can answer any question you put to it or perform multiple tasks. It is an AI that doesn’t rely on scripts or a limited set of information. We’re on this road because AGI is the next logical step in AI evolution, quite a big step, like moving from DOS to Windows or a flip phone to a smartphone. Interest in the subject has been piqued after John
5 Chatbot and AI Trends for 2020
The stats continue to show chatbots on the rise and AI becoming a growing force in how businesses operate. But in 2020, things will accelerate even faster, as the technology becomes more accessible and the benefits clearer across a wider number of markets and uses. Chatbots and AI are advancing so fast, they’ve already ploughed through what IT research firm Gartner’s Hype Cycle call the trough of disillusionment (where people get fed up of hearing about them and the tech initially fails to deliver), and are coming out the other side into the plateau of productivity (where practical benefits and evidence of value become clear). To be clear, we’re focusing on practical and achievable trends, even as others keep on pushing the hype button about job destruction and damage through AI. Only a couple of years back, MIT roboticist Rodney Brooks accurately wrote The Seven Deadly Sins of Predicting the
Your AI Likely Won’t Kill Anyone, but Build Chatbots and Services to Avoid the Risk
Death by AI is a tragic tale, and there are several high-profile instances, usually from self-driving cars or robots. Not because the AI was wrong, but because the human developers gave it the wrong information or wouldn’t enable it to act in a safe manner. Your chatbot or AI service might not be put people in the firing line, but build them like they might, just to be safe. The latest report to make the press about a terrible loss of life due to an AI’s poor decision making, comes from one of Uber’s fleet of test self-driving cars back in 2017, makes for grim reading. Even though the AI has since been updated, the poor victim can’t be rebooted. “For one, the self-driving program didn’t include an operational safety division or safety manager. The most glaring mistakes were software-related. Uber’s system was not equipped to identify or deal with
How Santa Chatbots Can Help You Sell More This Christmas
With the Christmas season getting closer, now’s a great time to start thinking about how Chatbots can enhance your Christmas-related e-commerce strategy. If you’re looking to sell more while also delivering a neat experience for customers, a Santa Chatbot can be a big winner. From customer service to delivering new content, customers will enjoy the chance to speak with Santa online. It’s something simple that you can set up online and use across a variety of different platforms to drive sales. Deliver friendly customer service It’s quite rare for someone to be contacting online customer service because they are having success with what they’re looking to do. This means that they can enter an interaction with a customer service representative or Chatbot with a negative attitude. However, if that customer service entity they are introduced to is Santa, that can have an immediate disarming effect and prove to be a
Key Statistics Driving Chatbot and AI Adoption
IBM reckons that chatbots can handle 80% of queries currently handled by your staff or customer support, helpdesk and other agents. These and other significant numbers are driving chatbot adoption into the mainstream, as most businesses realise the value of bots both for the company and customers. The typical market report for chatbots (cost $3,950) highlights the key drivers pushing this technology forward. They include the rising popularity of interactive online channels for all types of customers, and the sea change driven by fast-growing adoption across multiple industry verticals. Dragging chatbots back are the concerns over lack of personal service, in some cases the high cost and technical complexities for the business plus a general lack of awareness, often among leadership. At the ground level, businesses see bots as useful for their 24/7 operation, immediate response, ability to scale to large numbers of chats through the cloud and power of
The Best Chatbot Conferences of 2019 & 2020
With so much happening in the Chatbot ecosystem, conferences are a great way to stay current and check out some of the best chat bots. From Chatbot technology to Chatbot conversations to conversational ai to chatbot customer service, there’s something every industry worker can learn. Here’s a helpful list of chatbot conference 2019 and 2020. CHATBOT SUMMIT Berlin, Germany December 10-13, 2019 Chatbot Summit brings together Chatbot industry veterans from around the globe. There, you’ll find more than 50 exhibitors, and a truly global perspective of the industry. Sessions: Conversation Design Real Life Case Studies Hands-on Tech NLP Product/UX Notable companies: Google Adobe Vodafone Mercedez-Benz Consulting. Notable speakers: Leonid Mishkind, Technical Product Owner Christian Buchwald, Chief Technology Scout Susse Sønderby, Sr. Experience Designer Wally Brill, Head of Conversation Design Advocacy & Education THE CHATBOT CONFERENCE San Francisco, USA 2020 dates to be announced Chatbot Conference San Francisco is among the
2020 and Beyond for Customer Service
Customer service and the tools to deliver it are changing fast, every business should recognise that. Your customers certainly are, as everyone from pensioners down to teenagers are increasingly exposed to chatbots and AI across a wide range of services. The growth and reliance in these services will only shift the landscape further in the direction of automation. The American marketing obsession with baby boomers is finally coming to an end, as Generation Y (born ‘80s-’99) takes the reigns as the biggest spenders and most influential audience across the planet. However, their neat bracketing system tends to ignore a world where older folk are smartphone literate and active on social media. While teenagers are going their own way, ignoring anything their parents did like Facebook and Twitter, preferring new and more personal tools. One example, over half of Gen-Z types (born mid-90s to mid-2000s) would book a holiday based on
How to Choose: Live Chat vs Chatbots for Your Business
In an ideal world, a business would operate both a chatbot and have live operators, always on hand to help customers. In many scenarios, however, that isn’t possible, so how should you plan your business contact, customer care and other communication strategies in the age of the chatbot? Being left on hold, long wait times, no one picking up, no idea if your email got there? There are millions of these scenarios played out daily across the business and service world, which is part of the reason behind the push to chatbot adoption to improve the customer experience. This isn’t about robots taking jobs or the impersonal nature of automated response, but the best way to provide help and support, and to help grow the company as part of a digital business strategy, while keeping customers engaged and happy. All of that makes for big business, with market research firm
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