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What To Keep In Mind If Your Brand Is Considering Using A Chatbot

This article is more than 6 years old.

Chatbots are essentially digital boxes customers can use to converse with a human or with an AI-enabled bot. They present an incredible way for businesses and brands to engage their customers in natural conversations. Imagine what it would be like for consumers to hold conversations with their friends, decide what to do to together, and then make reservations or buy tickets from a single group chabtot experience.

Chatbots are still in their early days of course, and the AI ones can get confused very quickly, but there are plenty of reasons that chatbots are being embraced by the business world.

Customer Service

A chatbot offers a great way for customers to get the answers they need, sign up for a media subscription, and learn more about a product from an assistant. They've become so important that Accenture believes chatbots should be a part of your digital customer strategyMoreover there's a potentially significant cost saving. According to one source chatbots can reduce customer service costs by as much as 30%. 

There's also a social aspect to chatbots says Brett Klein, owner of Hinterland Outfitters. "We use chatbots as part of our social marketing efforts. They have an invaluable addition to our overall marketing strategy and our customers love it."

Engage Customers in Deeper Conversations

According to Jaiden Gross, CEO of Instagram marketing firm Orquence, “People are always looking for individual – and typically instant – attention from a business. They might not pick up their phones and ask a business a question directly, but consumers can still be expected to ask some questions during the research phase of choosing a product.”

Customers will typically direct their conversations to a live chatbot if given the chance, giving businesses the chance to turn a conversation into a conversion.

Obtain Insights on Customers 

Knowing the kinds of questions your customers are asking, what responses get them to continue the conversation, or just knowing when and how often customers communicate with your brand can give you a wealth of insight on customers. Rahe Riazi, CEO of digital marketing firm Copperblu points out that, “Facebook offer analytics through their Messenger app, and now other analytic startups such as Botmetrics and Dashbot are creating tools for other bots operating on platforms such as Kick and Slack.”

So, which brands have their own bots? The truth is a lot of brands are putting together their bots, including TDAmeritrade, CoverGirl, Kia, the NBA, and even the Washington Post. Forrester’s H2 2016 Global Mobile Executive Online Survey suggests that 49% of surveyed marketers and digital business executives said that they were using – or developing – bots.

Here are just some of the businesses using bots and what they use them for:

Estée Lauder

A trip to the Estée Lauder Facebook page offers beauty fans the chance to open up Messenger and interact with a chatbot. The bot will use data from Facebook to greet the consumer with their name and then ask them some questions to help determine the right product for them. The bot then offers the consumer a video tutorial showing how to apply the makeup, and a link to buy it from their website. 

Paramount Pictures’ and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles; Out of the Shadows

Paramount Pictures had one of the most fun and imaginative ways to use chatbots for marketing. During the run up to the release of the latest Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie, Turtles fans could interact with their favorite turtle through chatbots on Kik. The responses were pre-determined of course, but that didn’t make it any less fun.

American Express

AmEx allows their customers to connect an eligible card to their Facebook Messenger account, which allows them to make purchases directly from Facebook pages or on games such as Candy Crush. While the bot is able to answer some questions, there are human customer care pros ready to take over if it gets confused.

How Do These Bots Work? It’s Not Magic

Even though a number of chatbots work through rules-based systems that determine automatic responses to certain interactions, these chatbots are hardly some kind of magical miracle. They will need the occasional bit of human intervention. Forrester noted in their State of Chatbots report from October 2016 that some chatbots needed humans to answer questions sometimes, and even the responses from the chatbots weren’t immediate.

Humans are an important part in allowing chatbots to have complex conversations. Many chatbots don’t have the depth and sophistication to be considered a true form of AI, which takes machine learning and will need more advancements in natural language processing to create a true AI that thinks and acts like a human brain. The chatbot of today is limited in the number of responses they have, and the number of pre-set rules that determine these responses.

Chatbot Tips

  • Be selective; you should be careful to avoid making a chatbot do too much. Keep them simple and streamlined, such as the Estée Lauder chatbot that is designed to help customers choose the right foundation for them. It gives the consumer a better idea of the true worth of the chatbot and what they offer.
  • Find ways to integrate the chatbot experience into your owned channels, such as your website, app, or mobile wallet, to create a deeper and more direct customer experience.
  • The chatbot should be one cog in the overall marketing machine designed to engage and reach users. It should be combined with online and mobile app notifications, SMS messages, emails, and more.

Remember that many marketers are still trialling chatbots, so make sure you use them creatively and strategically.

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