Apps are not that special anymore. As research points out, 2.2 million apps were available for Android users alone. IPhone users can choose between 2 million apps, making Apple’s App store the second largest app store. For that fact alone, it becomes harder and harder to discover new apps because of the great availability.
According to Pew Research Center, smartphone users spend most of their time to 5 apps only. Since two years this trend also changed to using messaging apps more frequently than social networking apps. This is a devastating trend to companies as they are using social networks and apps to reach their customers. To access a wider range of people companies need to embrace the trend and implement it in their social strategy.
Chatbots are the answer to this trend for companies to continue reaching their customers daily. They can bridge the gap between users who only use their smartphone for messaging and make them able to be updated about their favourite brands and interests. Many people don’t use different apps for every interest that they have, but they still text or use WhatsApp to keep in touch with friends and family. To engage chatbots in their text use, companies can reach these people because it is more conversational and human by design.
Chatting with companies instead of calling them for questions, not using different apps to search for that particular information and having a more personal connection with your favourite online interests are all appealing advantages for consumers. To visualize this, let’s have a look at Joy. This company tracks your moods every day by asking you on Facebook messenger how you are doing today and providing you with tips against stress. This is of course not very necessary to use, more fun for people who like to have these tips daily. A more useful example is the KLM booking confirmation on Messenger function. Everyone is very busy these days, how easy is it to just send a message to KLM and have your booking details and boarding pass quickly available?
Many other companies as for example, Zalando, CNN and eBay are already using these Chatbots and these numbers will only grow in the future. Companies cannot stay behind and must be reachable to their customers at different moments of the day. The popularity of Chatbots will depend of the purpose it serves, but I think it will be useful and easy if I just can send a text or WhatsApp to a Chatbot for small and urgent information. How about you? Would you use Chatbots? Or do you think this is too personal and you would rather use different apps or google for information?
Sources:
www.statista.com/statistics/276623/number-of-apps-available-in-leading-app-stores/
www.pewinternet.org/2015/04/01/us-smartphone-use-in-2015/
www.emarketer.com/Article/Mobile-Messaging-Reach-14-Billion-Worldwide-2015/1013215
www.hellojoy.ai/
Thanks for your interesting post, Diana. I totally agree with you that Chatbots can be very useful in several ways. Chatting with companies instead of calling them saves time, you can send the message whenever and wherever you want instead of waiting several minutes in phone queues for customer service. In this case, you approach the Chatbots/ companies yourself and probably you will find their services useful. However, I think that Chatbots can become annoying too. What if these Chatbots start sending you adds/spam you don’t want? Think about your mailbox, most of the emails you receive are adds/ spam, although you can unsubscribe for these adds, it wouldn’t be very beneficial if this happens to your Whatsapp…