After my first post about Facebook Messenger Bots, I continued my research because I understand the importance of Chatbots and Instant Messaging apps. Following a transcription of the presentation that I published on Slideshare.
The assumptions from where I started my reasearch are:
- Users don’t want conversations. Users want pertinent and timely contents within the app that they use most.
- Chatbots have the reason to exist because users don’t like to download lot of apps and because mobile sites are slow or difficult to navigate.
- Chatbots are a communication channel with an interaction pattern in a sort of way similar to the natural language. They aren’t virtual sales agents.
- Chatbots have the difficult mission to bring together contents and services within messaging apps.
- The best chatbots performances aren’t based on conversations. Interacting with them requires new functions and a standardized command language.
So I can say that Chatbots are an important technology because:
- they represent a way for engaging users within their favorite apps
- they can replace apps and websites for simple and recurrent tasks
- they are the only direct marketing channel comparable with the email
- they revolutionize the smartphone’s push communication marketing
- they are the entrance point for advanced data building programs
- users interest in downloading branded apps is decreasing
- mobile navigation sometimes is frustrating
- users are accustomed in making Google searches in a conversational way
But this importance bring with it some threats:
- chatbots can’t really understand natural language
- chatbots can’t replace the all the other apps functions
- chatbots could decrease the users curiosity and research capacity
- chatbots will struggle for visibility
- chatbots can’t wrong a lot of answers and they can’t ask too much questions
- chatbots must care a lot about language, style, frequency and relevancy of their push contents
- chatbots aren’t a branded channel
Chatbots are the future of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Direct Marketing for the following reasons:
- because they deliver profiled offers and contents, receiving immediate feedbacks
- because they are an effective support for the human-based customer care
- because they will build accurate customers profiles analyzing the interactions and asking for information, ratings etc
Thinking about all these incredible opportunities, I examined the standard instant messaging apps user experience and I realized that Chatbots should have a dedicated set of functions that designed as following.
At this point I tried to go practical matching my Chatbots functions and experience with some generalistic companies.
