(c)iStock.com/Martin Dimitrov
It appears a day goes by with no new, publisher, or celebrity.
Conversational AI is helping Facebook Messenger users select flights and holiday destinations using Skyscanner; Selfridges and Burberry have balances on WeChat and Line users may chat into some Taylor Swift bot.
But how can we reach this point? After all, excitement for chatbots represents a significant change for publishers and brands, whose client participation efforts in recent years are geared towards maintaining clients within the ‘walled gardens’ of native programs that are mobile.
It isn’t that surprising. A significant opportunity is represented by the opening up of major messaging platforms into marketing. Through development via WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, WeChat, and Line, manufacturers may reach a combined audience of four billion users.
It’s a priceless opportunity to interact within the services rather than manufacturers demanding users come in their programs that are possessed.
Increasingly, those most-used providers are messaging programs, rather than social media sites, as they evolve into ‘shops’, baking in capabilities that would have commanded their own apps, such as research, eCommerce, and client services.
Where Asian companies such as Line and WeChat have led concerning the creation of consolidated ‘super platforms’, the likes of Facebook (using upgrades to Messenger) and Google (with the launching of Allo) are following.
Be where your audience is
Brands moving where consumers already are’s importance cannot be overstated. In January 2014, WeChat added functionality enabling users to pay and book for taxis in its messaging program.
A month after launch, 21 million cab rides was reserved and paid for through WeChat, also Didi Dache (the leading on-demand taxi service in China) was visiting 700,000 WeChat-led reservations a day
Why else might brands be better off looking ahead to chatbots, rather than back to heritage native apps? App development and upkeep is expensive, regarding both price and time.
Potential to alter smartphones
Chatbots are a much less tough investment, and may be much more readily updated on-the-fly to improve the user experience according to real-time utilization data, instead of needing to guarantee lengthy app update cycles (and relying on consumers to upgrade their apps whatsoever). Chatbots will also be an ‘always on’ channel in a manner that native apps cannot be.
Brands that let themselves fall behind the curve risk being cut from the customer conversation entirely
Renowned software programmer and lead programmer at Tumblr Marco Arment published a post in which he suggested that AI-led services like chatbots have the capability to fully upturn what smartphones are for, in the exact same manner as apps once did.
It is an interesting — and exciting — notion, thinking about the impact that apps have had on consumers, brands, and entrepreneurs.
While the surprise emergence of this first iPhone in 2007 reset expectations of exactly what smartphones should look like and how users should interact with them, the advent of this App Store the year changed what smartphones were.
By inviting software Apple redefined the smartphone as the versatile personal computer we know now, leaving explicitly apparatus in its aftermath.
Placing front and centre at iOS set the tone for the users would utilize smartphones.
Apps are evolving to survive
But evidence suggests that despite there being more than 1.5 million apps available on the App Store alone and over 1,000 new programs entering the Google Play store and Apple App Store daily — the program bubble has burst.
Every month the average consumer now downloads zero apps. Only one percent of publishers generates 94% of US App Store earnings. Apps are no longer business.
Much consumer is down into the ‘friction’ involved with using and downloading programs, an issue Google sought to address with the coming of ‘Instant Apps’ in May.
Rather than downloading an whole program they might just need once, consumers can instead have the required elements automatically download when they want them for a specific job — the payment functionality when utilizing a parking program, for example.
Alongside chatbots, yet another answer to the diminishing appetite for apps has been for new to embrace a strategy, cannibalising their own app traffic so as to keep users engaged by enabling them to access services through platforms. In particular has successfully implemented this strategy, allowing people to utilize its service through platforms like Uber, RunKeeper, and Sonos.
It’s definitely easy to imagine ‘bot shops’ becoming the App Stores, since the underlying technology becomes more sophisticated, customers become more manufacturers experiment with executing marketing that is conversational and more comfortable engaging with AI.
In his blog post, Arment also hypothesised that Apple — without a track record in R&D in AI conducts a danger if that change does come about, of being left behind in the . But it is Apple that’s something.
Risk being cut out of their customer conversation entirely.
What do you believe about chatbots – Are you currently considering using them in your branding efforts?
