media update’s Adam Wakefield spoke to Godfrey Parkin, CEO of innovation and strategy firm Britefire, about his presentation at the Marketing Disruptions conference on Wednesday, 7 March, and how chatbots are going to change the way brands interact with customers.

You will be speaking about how messaging, AI and chatbots can revolutionize customer experience. How much has chatbot technology improved over the last three years to make it a viable technology for brands?

The first wave of bots were disappointing. The artificial outweighed the intelligence, and the conversation engines were just modified phone trees. But the technology of cognitive agents has improved exponentially, and the progress made in natural language processing is breath taking.

We are no longer restricted to awkward typing and reading of text. Voice recognition and synthetic voice tech have gone mainstream. Have you used an Amazon Echo recently, or noticed how your phone’s Google Assistant knows exactly what you are asking, no matter how inaudibly you mumble?

But tech is not everything – Photoshop won’t make you Ansel Adams and Word won’t make you Stephen King. Easy-to-use bot tools inevitably allow awful user experiences to flood the market. The art of effective bot design lies not in code but in crafting the conversation architecture so that the desired outcome for both brand and customer is achieved. Marketers and ad agencies rarely have these skills.

As brands get better at integrating their CRM databases with chatbots, the systems have begun to understand each customer, so contextualised conversations can happen seamlessly. Today there’s no technical or budget barrier to deploying a chatbot if the use-case warrants it.

Compared to dealing with a human operator, what are the advantages for a customer working with a chatbot? What does a chatbot give a brand?

For the customer the advantages are speed, quality, immediacy and personalisation. If the conversation architecture has been well-defined, they know they are not talking to a human, but they don’t care. A 2016 Nielsen study found that 56 percent of people would rather message a business than call customer service. And that was before bots got smarter. The awkwardness of chatting to a bot is rapidly being replaced by a preference for chatting to a bot.

For a brand, chatbots can give human agents superpowers, upping call-centre productivity and lowering costs. The Gartner group now forecasts that within two years AI will disrupt the jobs of one million phone-based customer support agents. Open rates on chat messages average 98%, which makes Facebook’s near-zero social posting delivery rate look almost pointless. A chatbot can handle hundreds of simultaneous conversations, provide a 24/7 customer engagement environment, in which each of those conversations is tailored and personal.

Of course, bots can hand off to humans for more complex engagement where needed. The ROI can be substantial.

You refer to messaging expanding onto the social customer service scene. What do you exactly mean by “messaging” and why is this expansion important?

Messaging is all about one-on-one communication between an individual and a brand. It’s an evolution of in-boxing, which in turn is an evolution of emailing. The traditional communication in social media is “posting” – a public communication that can be seen by anyone, engaged with by anyone, shared to everyone. There’s no privacy, no personal relevance, no intimacy.

Intimacy is what distinguishes meaningful relationships. The conversations we value most are always private. This is why ‘messaging’ platforms such as Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp have outgrown ‘social’ platforms for personal communication – and why brands need to embrace them. More than two billion messages are already shared between people and businesses on Messenger each month.

If you want a customer to feel valued or special, you have a personal conversation – you don’t broadcast to the world in the hope of resonating. The power in social networks has always been in people talking to people about your brand. The power in messaging lies in an individual talking with your brand about their needs. Social media builds brand awareness and endorsement; messaging builds relationships, sales and loyalty.

Beyond chatbots, how else do you think AI will revolutionize customer service?

We are already at a point where AI is able to outperform humans at an astonishing number of tasks, in every field from surgery to investment advice.

Customer-contact AI will kick in in-store, online, and in sales and service call centres. Behind the scenes, AI will become pervasive in all other data-leveraging areas such as finance, inventory, supply chain, and contract management.

In-store facial recognition is already proliferating. It is increasingly enhanced by emotion detection, even fashion style detection. Past behaviour pattern analysis will be increasingly used for promoting personalised offerings at the point where the individual is at maximum likelihood of buying. Friend analysis will be used to maximise peer endorsement. Dynamic pricing or personalised payment terms will make it easier for people to want to buy.

As for websites, I believe that conversational interfaces will soon eclipse traditional ecommerce sites. To be able to order products, book flights or manage your investments without having to download an app or go through the machinations of a website is very appealing. Gartner forecasts that by 2021, ecommerce brands which support visual and voice search will increase revenue by 30%. In counties where literacy is a problem, voice commands and responses open up markets.

For more information, visit www.marketingmixconferences.co.za.

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As Parkin alludes to, marketing is the midst of profound change. Mobile technology has also changed online marketing, especially in Africa. Read more in our article, Succeeding online is placing audiences, mobile, and video first.