Chatbots – Coming one day to a device or business near you?

By Adam Wakefield

In December last year, Oracle released it’s Can Virtual Experiences Replace Reality? report, which polled over 800 senior marketing and sales professionals across Europe, the Middle East and Africa. It is this report, and her own work, that leads Troskie to argue that South Africa, and the world at large, is approaching a tipping point when it comes to the use of chatbots and VR for that matter.

“It is quite interesting that South Africa is not that far behind the curve, which is very exciting news for me as a customer experience advocate in South Africa,” Troskie says.
A quarter of those spoken to for the report are from South Africa and are evenly split between the telecommunications, online retail, manufacturing and high tech engineering industries. Professionals from the United Kingdom, France, and the Netherlands also participated in the survey.

In terms of chatbot use, it is the Dutch who are leading the way, with 40% of brands surveyed using them. This is versus 36% of brands in the UK, 38% in France and 30% in South Africa. Where South Africa has an advantage, according to Troskie, is local brands are the most confident in recognising customer behaviour trends before their competitors.

Fifty one percent of South Africans surveyed agreed with that view, compared to 50% in the UK, 41% in the Netherlands, and 31% in France. The report also found that 55% of UK consumers do independent research before opening a purchase conversation, compared to 43% in South Africa, 33% in the Netherlands, and 30% in France.

“The other interesting fact is 78% of brands expect to provide customer experience through virtual reality in the next four years, which is quite high, while 80% expect to do service through chatbots,” Troskie says.

“The research found that 40% of senior sales and marketing executives agree customers do more independent research before interacting with them and 35% know that their customers prefer to make purchases or resolve queries without speaking to sales or customer service teams.”

While the use of chatbots is expected to increase, a gap that needs to be filled is for them to be effective concerning customer data, says Troskie.

“How accurate is their [brands using chatbots] data? Do they really know their customers? Forty one percent agree that smart analytics of customer data will have the biggest impact on customer experience,” Troskie says.

“What is very concerning is brands don’t include social or all their CRM data, and to really do this well you need to include a lot of it. I think data is going to be the biggest downfall of chatbots if executed incorrectly.”

Asked in which markets consumers will likely encounter chatbots sooner than later, Troskie suggests the banking and telecommunication industries will be the ones where rubber is likely to meet the chatbot road. At present, neither industry is quite there yet.

“If you look at what local banks and telcos are doing, they have virtual rooms where they start to make their consumers aware that you don’t need face-to-face interaction. The banks will have a computer in front of an employee and they will chat to customers from a central location,” Troskie says.

Before their use can become widespread, ensuring chatbot AI is responsive, but not too responsive, will be very important.

“The general public use slang, and other language, including racist, offensive or foul language,” Troskie explains.

“If a chatbot’s learning function is not well designed, it will become a bad robot just through interacting with the public, with people varying widely in the language they use. Also, a sign of a well-designed chatbot is if it asks the users’ permission to interact or give updates, being proactive rather than reactive.”

The tough decisions brands now face is when exactly to put their feet in the water. Do they join the early movers and experiment with chatbots that will not be as refined as later versions? Do they sit back and wait for the right technology to appear, allowing their rivals a chance to get ahead of them?

“They need to walk before they can run. Some brands will just jump in and use chatbots,” Troskie says.

“You need to be very careful if you are a brand. If you move into the chatbot space, you are going to upset some of your older customers. I don’t believe it will replace everything.

It won’t replace email conversations or self-service websites. It will be a value-add, a new way to communicate.”

Oracle’s Can Virtual Experiences Replace Reality? report can be accessed here.

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