With the rise of social media several years back, many businesses recognized the value of being customer-oriented. At the same time consumers changed their search habits and started trusting social media to conduct product research. A type of conversational culture towards customers settled not only in the small innovative startups but also in big corporations.
Companies used social media as a platform to share content, promotion, extract consumer data and communicate directly with all of their followers. But if a brand has a million followers on a social network, is it possible to get in touch and reply to all of them?
The answer is: Deploy a Chatbot
A chatbot is a set of algorithms that leverages artificial intelligence to engage in human interaction.
What can they do for businesses? Chatbots are most likely going to centralize the way consumers interact with any company. Currently, social media serves as a bridge that re-directs social media users to the brand’s website. The use of a chatbot will allow direct and fast, targeted and personalized communication with the consumer. For instance, Facebook integration already provides an infinite source of consumer data for chatbots, which will in turn make them even more customer-oriented – i.e. post when the consumer is on their device, deliver context-related updates and information.
Companies are already using Chatbots
Dominos were one of the first to implement this type of AI in their order options. The idea is that people should not have to switch the media they are using at the moment to order pizza. They can just send a message with a pizza emoji to any of the social media profiles of Dominos and then a bot will scan the message and process the order. Of course, there are some disadvantages and you can read more about them here.
Chatbots are also presenting the perfect opportunity for innovative startups to emerge. For example, Niki.ai is developing a personal shopping assistant bot that can perform different tasks such as online shopping but also taxi booking and mobile recharge. At the moment, Facebook has over 11,000 bots for you to try and the number is always growing.
The hype
Still the evolution of chatbots is largely dependent on the development of AI. Experts share their concerns that AI is still not to the level that we read about in the media. On top of that, chatbots bring their own set of privacy concerns and reliability issues.
So even though there is a huge potential for chatbots, and in my opinion they can definitely turn into a big platform for both developers and marketers, the questions is can chatbots live up to the hype?
What do you think? Do you think we can witness a completely bot-driven social media? Let me know in the comments?
Thank you for your great blog Stefani! While I do think chat bots can be useful to a certain extend, for example, for simple orders or questions, I believe that humans are necessary right now to answer more difficult questions or concerns customers may have. Next to that, Chatbots still need to be developed more in order to work perfectly, as shown in the link you posted (the disadvantages).
Thus, I doubt that anytime soon, we can witness a completely bot-driven social media. But who knows, I might be surprised 🙂
Hi Ananda! Thanks for your comment! I happen to agree with you. No matter how advanced bots are at the moment they still require human intervention. As I mentioned they are highly dependent on the development of AI. I firmly believe both of these are buzz words and are in a hype. But for sure it will be interesting to see what comes out of it 🙂