Let’s start off with a quick “True or False?” game:
“By 2020, the average person will have more conversations with their bot than with their spouse.”
True, or false? You may be surprised to learn that speaking more with bots than our spouse is precisely what Gartner is predicting.
And when Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg says “messaging is one of the few things that people do more than social networking,” it requires no leap of faith to see that chatbots are an integral part of marketing’s future.
But you don’t need to stock up on canned peaches and head for the hills because “the robots are coming.” The truth is, the robots aren’t coming because they’re already here, and they love us from the bottom of their little AI-powered hearts.
Bots aren’t a new thing for many parts of the world such as China or India. As reported by Business Insider, sixty-seven percent of consumers worldwide have used a chatbot for customer support in the last year.
Within the United States, an impressive 60% of millennials have used chatbots with 70% of those reporting positive experiences, according to Forbes.
There’s no putting bots back in the box.
And it’s not just that brands have to jump on board to keep up with those pesky new generations, either. Bots are great for them, too.
Bots offer companies:
- A revolutionary way to reach consumers. For the first time in history, brands of any size can reach consumers on a personal level. Note my emphasis on “of any size.” You can be a company of one and your bot army can give your customers a highly personal experience. Bots are democratizing business!
- Snackable data. This “one-to-one” communication gives you personal insights and specificity, plus a whole feast of snackable data that is actionable.
- Non-robot-like interaction. An intelligent bot can keep up with back-and-forth customer messages in a natural, contextual, human way.
- Savings. According to Juniper Research, the average time saving per chatbot inquiry compared to traditional call centers is over four minutes, which has the potential to make a truly extraordinary impact on a company’s bottom line (not to mention the immeasurable impact it has on customers’ feelings about the company).
- Always on. It doesn’t matter what time zone your customer is in. Bots don’t need to sleep, or take breaks. Your company can always be accessible via your friendly bot.
Here in the West, we are still in the equivalent of the Jurassic Period for bots. What they can be used for is truly limited only by our imagination.
One of my most recent favorites is an innovation from the BBC News Labs and Visual Journalism teams, who have launched a bot-builder app designed to, per Nieman Lab, “make it as easy as possible for reporters to build chatbots and insert them in their stories.”
So, in a story about President Trump from earlier this year, you see this:
It’s one of my favorites not just because it’s innovative and impressive, but because it neatly illustrates how bots can add to and improve our lives… not steal our jobs.
Don’t be a dinosaur
A staggering eighty percent of brands will use chatbots for customer interactions by 2020, according to research. That means that if you don’t want to get left behind, you need to join the bot arms race right now.
“But where do I start?” you wonder.
I’m happy you asked that. Building a bot may seem like an endeavor that requires lots of tech savvy, but it’s surprisingly low-risk to get started.
Many websites allow you to build bots for free, and then there’s QNAMaker.ai (created by Microsoft, my employer), which does a lot of the work for you.
You simply input your company’s FAQ section, and it builds the foundation for an easy chatbot that can be taken live via almost any platform, using natural language processing to parse your FAQ and develop a list of questions your customers are likely to ask.
This is just the beginning — the potential for bots is wow-tastic.
That’s what I’m going to show you today — how you can harness bot-power to build strong, lasting relationships with your customers.
Your 3-step plan to make conversations convert
Step 1: Find the right place to start
The first step isn’t to build a bot straightaway. After all, you can build the world’s most elaborate bot and it is worth exactly nothing to you or your customer if it does not address their needs.
That’s why the first step is figuring out the ways bots can be most helpful to your customers. You need to find their pain points.
You can do this by pretending you’re one of your customers, and navigating through your purchase funnel. Or better again, find data within your CRM system and analytics tools that can help you answer key questions about how your audience interacts with your business.
Here’s a handy checklist of questions you should get answers to during this research phase:
- How do customers get information or seek help from your company? ☑
- How do they make a purchase? ☑
- Do pain points differ across channels and devices? ☑
- How can we reduce the number of steps in each interaction? ☑
Next, you’ll want to build your hypothesis. And here’s a template to help you do just that:
I believe [type of person] needs to solve [problem] which happens while [situation], which will allow them to [get value].
For example, you’re the manager of a small spa, whose biggest time-suck is people calling to ask simple questions, meaning other customers are on hold for a long time. If those customers can ask a bot these simple questions, you get three important results:
- The hold time for customers overall will diminish
- The customer-facing staff in your spa will be able to pay more attention to clients who are physically in front of them
- Customers with lengthier questions will be helped sooner
Everybody wins.
Finally, now that you’ve identified and prioritized the situations where conversation can help, you’ll be ready to build a bot as well as a skill.
Wait a minute — what’s a skill in this context, and how do they relate to bots? Here’s a great explanation from Chris Messina:
- A bot is an autonomous program on a network
- A chatbot is a bot that uses human language to communicate
- An AI assistant is a chatbot that performs tasks or services for an individual
- A skill is a capability that an AI assistant can learn
Each of them can help look things up, place orders, solve problems, and make things happen easier, better, and faster.
A few handy resources to build a bot are:
Step 2: Add conversation across the entire customer journey
There are three distinct areas of the customer decision journey where bots and skills can make a…
