how chatbots represent the evolution of the world of communication

Engage enterprises and customers in real time conversations 

Chatbots are a hot topic in tech — positioned at the intersection of many macro tech trends like the rise of artificial intelligence, messaging apps surpassing social apps in users, and enterprises struggling with customer acquisition and engagement on mobile. Descriptions boldly range from the next mobile runtime to Google-killers. Investment dollars are gushing into the leading messaging apps, and all of the tech giants have announced significant new initiatives. If you have ever used Amazon Alexa, you can see what the hype is about.

But will chatbots be as revolutionary as the hype would have it? The evidence suggests otherwise.

Lessons from China and India: ubiquity and simplicity

To predict how chatbots will evolve, we can look to Asia, a region that has led the West in this space. We’ll use WeChat in China and SMS-based messaging in India as examples.

WeChat is often cited as the poster child for chatbots. With 500m+ monthly active users and $7 ARPU, it is definitely worthy of all the attention. Much has been written about WeChat’s success, though I would argue most of it is not relevant. For example, much of its functionality is through a browser interface rather than a chat interface — hardly a model for the promise of automated chatbots. WeChat was launched four years ago, when the mobile ecosystem was still nascent. Modern solutions must navigate a mature market with entrenched competitors.

On a more positive note, the monetization model and the online to offline (O2O) integration are the most compelling learnings from WeChat. Monetization is focused on payments rather than advertising. Messaging apps occupy a highly personal space, and advertising is ill-suited in this space without risking user backlash. Integrated payments, however, are an important additive part of the user workflow. O2O integration allows WeChat to have a ubiquitous presence in all aspects of one’s interaction with a brand. WeChat’s integration with in-store QR codes facilitates user acquisition, and the WeChat payment platform allows for in-store payments.

Application-to-person (A2P) SMS messaging in India may be a more relevant precedent for today’s chatbots. In India, A2P messages are a ubiquitous aspect of daily life. Users receive more than a dozen messages a day, and more than 10 billion messages are sent each month across India. This market has evolved in recent years from notification-oriented messages (‘you completed an ATM withdrawal’), to marketing-oriented messages (SMS, not email, is the dominant digital channel), to customer service-oriented messages (‘your order will be delivered today’), and now interaction-oriented messaging (‘tell me my last 3 transactions’).

The success of messaging in India is highly instructive for what can be successful in the West, but not without its challenges. The most successful use cases were lightweight — useful information with little cognitive load given the 160-character limit for SMS. Also, transactional use cases did not require user consent. Solving this user acquisition challenge significantly accelerated adoption. It also carried risks as brands blurred the lines between transactional and marketing content. This led to significant user backlash and ultimately onerous regulations to restrict unwanted marketing SMS. Lastly, SMS was a ubiquitous platform. From this experience, there are clear learnings around simplicity, platform ubiquity, and user acquisition. It is also a cautionary tale for platform providers who must self-regulate how and when brands can send marketing messages to their users.

Success in the West: evolution, not revolution

Reflecting on these experiences, there are a few takeaways that argue for a more evolutionary approach for chatbots in the West:

• Early use cases are likely to be quite simple.
• Rich interaction experiences (e.g., buttons, menus) are required to drive complex use cases.
• Cross-platform support is critical for widespread adoption, and there are already more than a dozen relevant platforms, including Messenger, WhatsApp, Alexa, iMessage, Skype, Slack, SMS, and email.
• Platforms must tread carefully on user acquisition, ensuring it is not too onerous as to hamper growth while ensuring users are not inundated with undesired messages.
• Platforms must self-regulate to resist the pull to make chatbots another marketing channel.
• Payment integration will be a key enabler for consumer monetization.

Some of these trends are already taking hold. Amazon Alexa has done well commercially, though the capabilities are relatively limited and the A.I.is largely limited to voice recognition. Facebook, an early leader, has focused much of its effort on being thoughtful about user acquisition for brands and has also been proactive in its payment integration strategy. Facebook is also regularly rolling out richer tools for building more engaging bots. Apple’s recently announced changes to iMessage are similarly related to the critical UI components for building chatbots.

Opportunities

Most of the early hype around chatbots has been for consumer applications. I believe most of these investments miss the mark and will accelerate the inevitable disillusionment phase of the market.

We often hear about shopping, concierge, and travel service chatbots — much of what is referred to as conversational commerce. Building an A.I.-enabled solution for these use cases is complex given the open-ended nature of the problem. Also, the business model is challenging. As stand-alone apps they suffer from typical discovery challenges of mobile apps. Trying to ride the rails of one of the major messaging platforms is fraught with commercial risks. I do believe there will be exciting consumer-focused use cases, though I predict that they will mostly be complementary to traditional apps rather than apps in their own right.

Companies that focus on enterprise use cases around productivity or workflow (like x.ai and Talla) are building compelling solutions for productivity enhancement and task management. Workflow-focused companies like Drift and DigitalGenius are helping manage real-time customer conversations by deploying A.I.-enabled automation of the agent response. While these problems are complex, they are relatively narrowly defined and hence more solvable. The business models are also simpler because the botmaker can directly charge the enterprise.

The largest opportunity for chat interfaces may be to integrate them into the tools we use on a daily basis. Companies like Troops and Kasisto are tackling straightforward use cases like updating a CRM or getting information from one’s bank, where a chat interface provides a faster and simpler experience than today’s need for a dedicated app. Many solutions can be built through straightforward integration with the APIs incumbent software providers already offer, which require only limited A.I. capabilities.

Despite the rapid progress, there has been limited focus on cross platform support and integration of chatbots, an area critical for driving ubiquitous adoption. Twilio recently announced cross-platform support, and startups like Smooch.io, Gupshup.io, Kore, and Chatfuel are developing solutions. But these are challenging problems that require a higher level of investment. Across each platform, there are unique models and varying levels of support for functionality such as:

• User identity and authentication
• Context management (e.g., chat history across platforms)
• Platform preferences (e.g., restrictions on message sending)
• Content types (e.g., images, buttons, menus)
• Payment integration
• Bot testing and deployment

Cross-platform solutions that minimize the burdens on the bot developer will form the basis of an entire ecosystem of development, integration, and operational tools for chatbots, and will be a key enabler of growth.

Chatbots have the potential to be the next great innovation in software development. Early use cases, however, are likely to be evolutionary enhancements to how we interact with existing software. But as users become more comfortable with these interfaces, as the ecosystem matures, and as A.I. capabilities continue to improve, chatbots may indeed lead to a revolution in the software industry.

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tips for personalizing push notifications

Push notifications have the potential to provide a rich and exciting channel of communication between an operator and its customers. How should betting companies go about maximising their potential? 

Push notifications. When used poorly, they hold a reputation with end users as a distraction at best, and downright annoying at worst, an assessment that 52% of respondents to a November 2015 survey by mobile engagement platform Localytics and Research Now agreed with. However, deployed effectively and with the right considerations in mind they can be a useful tool for operators in driving customer engagement. According to research by the same company, those who opt to receive push notifications demonstrate 171% more total engagement with a mobile app.

A direct line of communication from a website or app to the customer, push notifications are messages that pop up on desktops or mobile devices and can be sent at any time, with users not required to be on the relevant webpage or using their devices to receive them.

While there are idiosyncrasies in terms of how different mobile operating systems allow for the use of push notifications – an iOS user must opt-in, whereas Android users must expressly opt-out – the general principles of how to deploy them effectively remain the same. Greg Karaolis, Head of Online and Innovation at SBTech, makes note of four key areas that betting companies must get right when sending push notifications: “As with most effective forms of customer communication, the aim is to send a targeted, engaging, actionable, and timely message to your users. Let’s take these one by one:

• Targeted: Ensuring you segment and understand your customer base so you don’t spam users with messages about offers, sports, events and bets they are not interested in.

• Engaging: Ensuring there is an offer, or a price boost, to ensure you grab the user’s attention. Or if it is a subscription-based notification around incidents or special offer, ensure they are well worded and grab attention, or include some kind of rich media.

• Actionable: Similar to above, this is ensuring that the user deeplinks to the right page, or has the bet preselected to make it is easy to take action from the notification

• Timely: This is about understanding when your users are most likely to be receptive to push (e.g. the hour before the event) or even better if it can be based on their own betting patterns. For example, if you expect a user to normally bet one hour before kick-off for the Champions League, if it gets to 15 minutes before this, a timely push with an offer may be the offer they need to get them to bet. 

Increase engagement with your APP users and drive conversions

Mario Ovcharov, Chief Marketing Officer at platform provider UltraPlay, echoes Karaolis’ feeling that targeting push notifications to users with eye-catching, actionable content is the key to making them successful: “Getting spammed every day for the same bonus, especially in our industry, is unlikely to have a positive effect.”

Ovcharov emphasises the importance of personal choice in ensuring that players are not turned off, noting that users are far more likely to respond to messages that are tailored to their interests. Elaborating, he states: “If you can subscribe for updates on a certain sports team or casino game that you like, that will be a much more effective manner in which to drive user engagement and prevent players being turned off. Expecting an untargeted and standard array of bonuses to have any great effect is not the future for this approach.”

Karaolis’ point regarding timing is worth re-emphasising, especially in light of the fact that the timeliness push notifications for sports betting operators is far more important given the acute nature of certain sports. Expanding on the point, Karaolis says: “If a customer has an interest in a match but we don’t send the push in good time to induce the bet, the match finishes and we have lost turnover. Regular ecommerce companies don’t face the same the problem, so the timing is much more critical for us.”

“Rich notifications” mark another manner in which betting companies can more effectively drive user engagement through push messaging. So-named due to their employment of media beyond the written word – images, videos, audio and GIFs are the obvious examples – rich notifications have been shown to have a far higher response rate than their less jazzy cousins. A 2016 study conducted by US marketing firm Urban Airship found that pictures boost direct response rates for push notifications by 56%.

This is an area in which gambling could learn a great deal from other customer-facing industries. “There has been little use of rich media to make push messages more engaging, and certainly targeted and tailored push messages are not widespread in our industry,” notes Karaolis, adding that: “No one promotes cash out of bets through push, or really personalised bet suggestions, and if we look at the wider ecommerce space we certainly see more tailored and targeted messaging there rather than the generic mass messaging we see prevalent throughout the online gaming industry.”

Targeted, timely and vibrant notifications are clearly a must for operators when looking to avoid the risk of turning players off and having your messages dismissed as spam. As Mario Ovcharov underlines, “It is a problem if players are just seeing the same information over and over again. It has to be more intuitive than that. Even sending something like ‘Ronaldo is injured today’ can move a player to be against Real Madrid, for example.”

Tying these elements together at the head of all these important factors is a growing need for these messages to be personalised to the individual user, in a manner that goes beyond a simple deployment of the opening gambit “Hi Firstname”. Analysing a player’s betting history for their casino games and sports markets they favour is undoubtedly crucial here, in order to push updates to players that are relevant to their interests and make them more likely to engage with the push notification. Analysing more than 1.5bn mobile push notifications between January 2015 and March 2016, marketing agency Leanplum found that adding various elements personalising these messages increased open rates by 800%.

Karaolis agreed when the issue of personalisation was put to him, and made a point of stating that “it’s not that difficult to get this right”.

“If you understand what your users like to bet on, when they are most likely to be receptive to a message, and what types of offers engage them, by user, then you have the most chance of cutting through with your message. Simple examples are promoted bets that they have won on before, for example, ‘Man United did the job for you last week? Can they do it again?’, then the offer. Sending push messages with enhanced cash out offers is a very good way to show customers that the message is only for them, for example: “Two legs of your acca have won, cash out offer was £90, now £100.”

While there shouldn’t be a tremendous amount in the assessment offered so far to take betting companies by surprise, Karaolis and Ovcharovs’ points relating to targeted and personalised messages are well worth making. As previously stated, they have carried a troubled reputation since they came to greater prominence following the June 2009 launch of the Apple Push Notifications Service. A survey by aforementioned marketing platform Localytics revealed in late 2015 that between two and five pushes per week would drive 46% of respondents to opt-out, while 6-10 a week would lead 32% of respondents to uninstall the app altogether.

“Quite a lot of operators don’t like using push notifications for this reason,” says Mario Ovcharov on whether their reputation as intrusive is merited. “Those that do use them do so on a basis of pushing untargeted bonuses, which is something I think will change as the industry continues to evolve with mobile technology.”

Concurring, Karaolis adds: “At the moment, the reputation is somewhat justified. In general I get the same set of push notifications from every operator on a Saturday with little feeling that there is something valuable in this message for me.” Clearly, it is important that operators properly measure the click through rate and bet placement in order to ensure any notifications are hitting the mark, and that they are prepared to scale back should a drop in engagement be noticed.

As for what the future holds for this emerging and increasingly prevalent means of user engagement in the gambling industry, Ovcharov highlights that the technology’s excellent potential as a retention tool. The concept of being able to place an offered bet simply through tapping the on-screen notification is one that Ovcharov mentions with enthusiasm.

Factors such as problem gambling must be taken into account, as with any form of marketing in this industry. As Karaolis makes clear: “Tackling problem gambling and protecting vulnerable individuals is something the industry has recently started taking very seriously, and rightly so.

“Obviously we have a responsibility not to market to people who we know are at risk, and we also need to be careful with sending push notifications to someone who may have downloaded an Android app before we have been able to verify their age.”

However, what is clear is that push notifications hold rich potential for betting companies as a means of boosting engagement. Operators and suppliers alike must now ensure that the framework and know-how is in place to ensure they can meet this potential, moving away from untargeted marketing blasts and towards being a more refined a personal channel between user and operator.

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how chatbots can help to streamline education

It’s an exciting time for innovations in ed tech, and chatbots are at the forefront. Mobile apps are still compelling and there are many use cases where an app can provide the richest experience. However, the downside is that you still need to download them, log in, keep them updated, and make sure they work well with your devices. When it comes to sheer speed and convenience, nothing can beat a chatbot.

So, what is a chatbot, anyway? In brief, it’s just software that allows for a conversational or messaging style interface that simulates a human interaction.

Most people use lots of messaging software for communicating with friends and colleagues already, such as SMS (texting), WeChat, SnapChat, WhatsApp, Kik, Telegram, Slack, and more. Chatbots allow us to use some of these messaging platforms for lots of tasks beyond just talking to a friend. For instance, now you can book a doctor’s appointment, shop for some jeans, call an Uber, or order a pizza using chatbots rather than logging into an app. Some chatbots have artificial intelligence and machine learning behind them, and others have a database of information and automated responses. Either way, chatbots allow you to get basic tasks done quickly and easily with a simple series of messages or commands. 

Deploy a mobile ready messaging strategy across your organization

Several recent events are encouraging a proliferation of chatbots. For instance, Facebook Messenger just opened its platform to allow developers to create bots. Slack users also have access to a marketplace of bots, such as Kip, a bot that lets you order office supplies right from your conversation channel with your co-workers. We’ll soon be seeing bots springing up in all different industries.

How can chatbots be useful in higher ed? In one example, AdmitHub created a chatbot to help new students navigate the college transition process; Georgia State students can now apply for student aid, register for classes, and apply for housing, all using a simple chat interface. In a recent Business Insider article, Bill Gates suggests that chatbots can be used as a tutoring resource for students. Cornell is using the CourseQ chatbot for event logistics at homecoming this fall, as well as for polling in the classroom.

This recent article by John Brandon shows how chatbots could be used to help parents manage the process of moving their kids into the college dorms. There are numerous other campus chatbot possibilities, including alumni relations, classroom engagement, student reminders, and more.

Some are concerned that chatbots will replace the meaningful human interactions that are such a critical part of the higher ed experience. However, one could also argue the opposite. Chatbots allow for the automation of certain types of routine, repetitive, time-consuming communication while freeing up more time for deeper philosophical discussions and interactions between professors and students. Should professors be wasting time answering questions such as “When is the paper due?” or “When are your office hours?” Instead they could be addressing larger questions about the meaning of time and space and about the analysis of the material they reviewed in class. IBM’s Watson is being used to power a Teaching Assistant bot that’s designed to do just that: answer routine questions while freeing up time for human professors and assistants to address the more meaningful issues. “Jill Watson,” as the AI is called, is doing this so effectively that some students don’t even realize that she isn’t human.

It should be noted that we are early in the bot revolution, and many AI solutions actually leverage human power while they’re building out their technology. Rather than being fully automated, some bots have humans responding or editing content as an interim step. In other words, the bots feature humans pretending to be machines that are pretending to be humans. Yes, we are living in wild times!

The bottom line is that students love messaging platforms and spend a lot of time on them already. Chatbots will allow higher ed administrators and professors to engage with students in a medium that’s ubiquitous, familiar, and comfortable for everyone to use. Many learning management tools are not keeping pace with the innovation in the tech industry, and students complain that the information they need is difficult to access in these outdated systems. In a world focused on convenience and ease, chatbots offer a welcome efficiency and productivity tool for students, parents, and faculty alike.

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why customers need real-time mobile communication

Deploy a mobile ready messaging strategy across your organization

As consumers have come to expect instant connectivity at the click of a button, it’s no surprise that more than 6 billion SMS messages are sent each day.

And while text messages have traditionally served as a means of communication between individuals, businesses have also begun incorporating various types of messaging capabilities into their sales strategies in order to meet consumers’ changing preferences for interaction.

Marketers recognize that today’s consumer path to purchase, particularly for high-consideration products and services, isn’t linear, winding through digital, traditional, and mobile touchpoints. And messaging, whether via chatbot or a text message, can be leveraged as a way to bridge that gap and close new business.

But with this new mode of communication comes new complexities and questions: What is the ideal role of messaging in a sales conversation? When does it improve the chances of sales, and in what instances can it actually help answer customers’ questions?

What actually happens when consumers text companies?

Our data shows that offering consumers the option to text (when they already have the option of email or phone) generally increases consumer engagement, but can also cause confusion, as consumers may not have much prior experience with messaging businesses. So let’s start with a few situations where messaging is helpful to the purchase process.

At its best, messaging helps consumers answer basic questions while giving a business insight into a consumer’s intent. Take online promotions, for example. A cable company might run a campaign that offers local students discounted television and internet services. If a student comes across a mobile advertisement promoting the discount, they may wonder, Does this apply to me? Rather than take the time to call the cable company and speak with an agent, some students would prefer to text the company as a first step, to confirm their eligibility before taking the next steps. For binary questions like this, automated messaging or chatbots are especially promising.

At this point, a salesperson can guide the consumer down the best path to purchase. It also entices consumers to take the next step, which is often a phone call, as the conversation becomes too cumbersome or complex for messaging. In our trials, more than 20 percent of texts to businesses lead to phone calls or in-person conversations. What’s more, these phone calls are shorter, as most of the initial questions have already been answered, and convert at more than double the rate of a typical call. In these instances, messaging helps to move these qualified customers down the sales funnel, boosting revenue for businesses.

Where messaging falls short

Still, there are some situations in which messaging can do more harm than good. Our analysis shows that messaging is not suitable for complex purchases or inquiries, which constitute half of all communications between consumers and businesses.

Take our student looking for cable packages. While the student was able to determine if they were eligible for the cable promotion using messaging, they may ask one of 100 different types of questions before making a decision about what package they actually should purchase. This is where messaging falls short. Any one of these questions has an exponential number of potential follow-up questions, which an automated response cannot easily satisfy.

If businesses attempt to remedy complex questions with messaging, they run the risk of annoying customers and losing potential sales as a result when their messages are misunderstood. The same desire for instant gratification that has given way to the rise in messaging also results in frustration when their needs aren’t easily met.

For instance, it’s common for consumers texting businesses to say “Are you there?” because of long wait times or bad cell phone service, and because they aren’t sure if the conversation is live. It’s also common for someone to text “I don’t understand.” It’s at that moment human intervention is required to rescue the potential purchase. So where do companies net out with messaging?

It’s clear that consumers today demand easy access to information, and businesses that ignore that desire will be passed up for their competitors that do offer services like messaging. There is promise for messaging and automation early in the sales process, to help establish initial intent and encourage conversions. But a company’s best bet will be to balance automated, text-based, and voice-based interactions appropriately to maximize sales from the mobile consumer.

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how to use mobile marketing for a B2B lead generation campaign

Consumer preference for accessing content through mobile devices is now almost universal. Business buyers are not far behind, using their devices to research their needs and identify further sources of information, potential vendors, and service providers.

In fact, B2B mobile usage is intensifying throughout the entire buying cycle. According to a Google and Millward Brown Digital study of 3,000 B2B decision-makers about their research and purchase habits:

• 42% of researchers use a mobile device during their purchasing process.
• Search activity for those using a smartphone has intensified.
• B2B researchers aren't just using mobile devices when they are out of the office; 49% of those who use their mobile devices for research—comparing prices, reading about products, comparing feature sets—do so while at work.

Companies can respond to these opportunities by infusing "mobile experiences" that span marketing, customer service, e-commerce, and IT functions so that the customer experience is fluid, yet consistent.

Here are four ways B2B companies can use mobile along the customer journey.

1. Build immediacy in customer engagement with SMS texts:

SMS offers B2B marketers unparalleled reach, a simple method of engagement, and the ability to deliver information with a sense of immediacy.

Although SMS is powerful in its own right, it is also a highly effective complement to other digital marketing tactics. Employing SMS is the easiest initial method for customers and prospects to connect to your brand, and as a way to opt in to your use of their mobile phone number.

Offer a service where your business clients can sign up for text-based ordering reminders. For instance, if a company orders your product or service every quarter, send a "time to reorder?" message a few days before the normal ordering date. If you make your customers' jobs easier and less stressful, they'll consider your company for future purchasing decisions.

Identify specific opportunities to engage customers and prospects via SMS. Focus on useful pieces of information that you can deliver at their moment of peak value. Build engagement scenarios that ramp up in intensity from SMS to mobile Web to, if applicable, native mobile applications, and even your pre-sales or sales teams.

2. Extend the value of live events:

B2B buyers expect fluidity between digital and physical experiences. Digitize content to shift live events from point-in-time activities to the centerpieces of ongoing customer interactions. A 2017 B2B Content Marketing Trends report showed that in-person events are in the top four marketing tactics.

Mobile devices, proximity sensors, and badge scanners help marketers learn more about target buyers and engage current customers by helping attendees network, solve problems, and meet experts. Mobile easily allows users to become part of the action by responding to surveys, sharing photos and comments socially, and giving real-time feedback. Moreover, B2B marketers can extend the event impact with digital content and experiences for ongoing engagement with prospects and customers.

3. Enhance customer service and care:

Mobile is pivotal in customer care not only because of increased consumer usage and satisfaction with this touchpoint but also because of productivity gains. Today, virtually all customer service offers some mobile customer service capabilities.

A recent study found that a whopping $62 billion is lost through poor customer service in the US.

Customers will demand greater ability and flexibility to interact with customer service organizations via mobile devices—for example, reading an FAQ while speaking with a customer service agent.

Customers can send SMS messages to company landlines and connect with a live agent who can answer questions in real-time via text. One great innovation in customer service software is the ability to record and share screens and videos. It enables customers to record the issue they are having either on their screen (for software issues) or using their webcam (for hardware/product issues) so the customer service agent knows exactly what is happening. As a response, the agent can record the solution, or the steps to take to resolve the issue, and share it with the customer to provide clear instructions.

Create troubleshooting videos for common problems and make them available for free on iTunes and the Android market. Direct customers to these videos and ask for feedback on how effective they were in solving the issue. That feedback will become another valuable connection to your customer and improve your company's own resources.

Mobile is not only a channel for customer service but also an overarching aspect of the customer experience. Each interaction should convey consistent and personalized data, contextual knowledge, and information to the customer.

4. Support the sales force:

B2B marketers often find themselves tasked with creating tools for Sales to use in the field. Mobile devices present an opportunity to create dynamic, timely collateral that goes beyond standard case studies and leave-behinds.

For example, a medical technology company loaded short videos of its best customer references and product demos and provided them to their sales reps on mobile devices. B2B marketers can also push out sales-enablement assets, such as pricing announcements, selling tips and quotas, buyer personas, competitive profiles, and the like.

The upshot: embracing mobile enables B2B marketers to carry the conversation to clients wherever they are. Customers want control over real-time, location-enabled interactions—which further heightens expectations for relevant real-time offers. B2B marketers need to shift their analytics systems and their traditional campaigns—which run over fixed time periods—to more flexible systems that can operate in customer time. Mobile makes that happen.

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how sms is the most versatile channel for companies to communicate with customers

When it comes to mobile marketing, there is a lot of room for growth among  businesses, according to a new report from Textlocal.

The report, based on a poll of 1,000 users, says Britain has roughly 80 million active mobile users, but just 50 per cent of businesses are using SMS for marketing.

However, that is about to change. SMS-based mobile marketing is expected to rise, from 37.2 million customers this year, to 48.7 million before we reach 2020. 

Dynamically Send, Receive & Enhance Text Message Campaigns.

If this trend continues, SMS marketing is set to become the fastest growing marketing channel.

Ofcom’s numbers are saying that 93 percent of the  population has a mobile phone, and the majority has it on them for more than 16 hours a day.

The study also points just how potent this channel can be - -98 percent of branded, or business-related SMS messages are opened, and 90 per cent get read within the first three minutes.

Textlocal managing director Jason Palgrave-Jones said: “By their very nature, mobile phones are to hand and provide an unrivalled platform for brands to communicate directly with their audiences. These are exciting times for those involved in the mobile industry as the benefits to businesses and consumers are realised.”

Direct Marketing Association managing director of the medium Rachel Aldighieri added: “The medium [SMS] is already widely used for sending marketing messages, however as technologies grow we expect to see an exponential rise in its use amongst businesses and consumers.”

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how enterprise chatbots is changing customer care services by artificial intelligence

Engage enterprises and customers in real time conversations

Customer support services have changed. Before, you'd have a team of people in an office with headsets and computers, answering call after call, and email after email. While this is still the case in many organizations, the way we communicate with our customers has changed and as a result, so has the technology we use.

Today, consumers have switched towards messaging applications as their preferred method of personal and professional communications. They interact with brands the same way they would with their family and friends. With that in mind, companies are following their audiences where they're most likely to be.

Unfortunately, finding the resources to interact with millions of potential consumers on a daily basis is near impossible, so we've started using robots. These robots are powered by artificial intelligence (AI), allowing them to interact with our consumers in the same way a human would. They're called chatbots.

The Benefits of Integrating an AI-Powered Chatbot Into Your Customer Care Services

As AI technology continues to grow, it's essential that your company includes it in its business processes, and what better place to start than in your customer care department? After all, this is where your company has some of the most important and enlightening conversations with your customers.

What makes having an AI-powered chatbot so great that companies of all sizes, from various industries, are using them to have some of their most important interactions with their audiences?

Instant Service

While technological advancements and the proliferation of the internet has given us numerous advantageous business solutions, it has also equipped consumers with the notion that they can receive the information they want, instantaneously. They've become increasingly impatient, leaving customer support teams under a mound of pressure.

Huge enterprises can't offer instantaneous support to their customer unless they hire millions of agents. AI-powered enterprise chatbot solutions allow you to create a chatbot that can take on all your more basic customer problems while cutting out the long waiting times.

Self-Service

It's not just about offering instant responses to your customers' queries. Enterprise chatbot solutions empower them to get answers without being put on hold or having to wait for an email response by creating a self-service system in their favorite messaging applications. Aside from empowering them, you'll only be making a one-time monetary investment, allowing you to cut costs and increase productivity.

Broader Reach

One of the biggest advantages of using enterprise chatbot solutions with AI in your customer support strategy is that you'll be available to your audience 24/7, on a global scale. Even if every one of your offices is closed, your customers will still be able to contact you with an emergency whether they're at home on a computer or using their mobile devices on the go.

Increased Sales

While your AI enterprise customer care chatbot will be predominantly used to interact with consumers and resolve any problems they may be facing, it can also become an integral part of your marketing and sales teams. With the right training, it will be able to send personalized offers to your customers on demand, as well as take orders, and process payments, among other activities.

Data Analysis

As mentioned above, your customer support team has some of the most important and enlightening conversations with your customers, but gathering and analyzing that amount of varied data is virtually impossible. Fortunately for us, AI-powered chatbots gather that data for us.

While many current enterprise chatbot solutions offer limited analytics, they do offer you the reports you need to analyze your conversations yourself. Metrics you can track include:

• Total number of users reached
• Average session duration
• Sessions per user
• Interactions per user
• Click-through rates
• Active and engaged users
• Confusion triggers
• Response time
• Conversation steps
• Retention rates

Creating Your Own AI Customer Care Chatbot

The real question is: how easy is it for large enterprises to include AI-powered chatbots into their processes? Lucky for us, gone are the days where coding and web development skills were required. Now, you can use an enterprise chatbot solution to simply creating an account and linking it to your social media profiles.

By using complex machine learning technologies, chatbot solutions can help you deploy an AI-powered chatbot into your customer care services in a matter of minutes. Your chatbot should be able to:

• Integrate with all the major payment systems
• Become an integral part of your marketing and sales team
• Use AI and natural language processing (NLP) to answer all your customer questions

Finally…

Enterprise chatbot solutions with AI are essentially super-intelligent customer service assistants. Despite these chatbots needing a human eye monitoring them ensure everything runs smoothly, they do offer large enterprises the chance to tend to a broader customer base while cutting costs and increasing productivity.

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how sms is essential as a pull marketing tactic

SMS marketing has been around since the 90s. Until recently, it was viewed as a bit of a niche tool. Now that businesses have realized how powerful it is, SMS marketing has experienced a surge in popularity. The simple fact is that the modern marketplace is changing, and Text has become one of the best ways to reach out to your customers. When executed correctly, SMS marketing is more powerful than any other method of digital outreach.

Dynamically Send, Receive & Enhance Text Message Campaigns.

 
1) SMS is Mobile

These days, mobile content is king. Traffic from phones and tablets now exceeds that from desktop sources. While PPC marketing, SEO, and web design scramble to catch up to the rapid changes in how we access information, sending and receiving text messages is a reflex that is natural to most consumers. There is no special training or explanation necessary, your audience will know exactly what to do with your message.

2) SMS is Read

Take a look at the stats of your mailing list. Even with a list of engaged readers, you’ll be lucky to hit a 30% open rate. SMS marketing, on the other hand, has an open rate of 90% within 3 minutes of sending the message. Most consumers have their mobile phone on them at all times, and receive notifications whenever a text message is delivered. Plus, SMS is a somewhat uncommon promotional method, so user’s inboxes aren’t flooded with promotional material. For the time being, SMS marketing is the most effective digital marketing technique you can employ.

3) SMS is Reliable

With an email campaign, you’re constantly fighting against spam filters. Even if you have a list of engaged, double-opt-in leads, a portion of your messages are going to miss the inbox. You never truly known how effective a campaign is going to be, making it hard to justify investing in an email list. But SMS is incredibly reliable. Users can opt-in and out instantly. This means that when you send out an SMS campaign, you’ll have 100% certainty that every subscriber on your list will receive your message.

4) SMS is Trackable

Is that SMS marketing is an untraceable channel. Sure, you might not get the level of detail you have with Google Analytics, but most of that data would be irrelevant for SMS. You have the ability to track all of the meaningful metrics of your campaign. You can see, in real time, how many messages have been delivered and how many have been read. You are also able to track customer engagement through responses and conversions. In fact, it’s even possible for you to create targeted campaigns that will allow you to gain a further understanding of your mobile database.

5) SMS is Engaging

Consumers are more willing to engage with businesses through text than through any other medium. According to the Mobile Marketing Association, consumers are five times more likely to respond to a text message than an email. For them, SMS is easy. Responding to a message just takes a few quick taps. Compared with other marketing strategies such as interstitials and pop up advertising, SMS marketing harbors positive feelings with clients instead of frustration.

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how push notifications helps users with timely and relevant content

In some ways this is understandable. As consumers we’re all familiar with push (all too familiar in some cases). And as marketers we love anything that feels like activity, and you can’t get much more active than firing out messages at random to millions of users! But the truth is that push is only a small piece of the mobile marketing puzzle.

Why is that? Well, for two core reasons are mentioned below:

• The ability to send push is many orders of magnitude less significant than how sophisticated your push campaigns are
• There are a number of other native mobile marketing tools available, all of which are often significantly more effective than push in achieving our objectives

Ultimately it all boils down to this. But as promised, let’s look at each of these in turn. Then we’ll join them up in the end.

Increase engagement with your APP users and drive conversions

Why Ability To Send Push Is About 10% Of The Story
 

There’s no need to beat around the bush. In the year 2017, the simple ability to send a push notification is about as valuable as having a large collection of carrier pigeons. As with any communications channel, all the value is in how you use it. So when any organization or vendor claims to have push notifications covered, it’s worth checking exactly what they mean by that.

Push sent without intelligence is little more than mobile spam. Again, as consumers most of us know this. But what do we mean by intelligence? Here’s just a few examples of what I am talking about:

• Proper, dynamic targeting. Not “people who have not been in the app for 7 days”. Try something like “people who left an item in the shopping cart, either on mobile or desktop, between 4 and 28 hours ago, who based on previous history are most likely to open the app at this time, and who have previously purchased via the app”. And that’s a single example. Targeting is everything.
• Thoughtful personalization. It’s relatively straightforward to add in a name. But smarter personalization involves the majority of the content of a push message being relevant solely to that individual. In the example above – what item was left in the shopping cart? You have the data – name it!
• Tested content. As we noted above, it’s easy to send push notifications, but how do you know what you are sending is effective? For that matter, how do you know what you send is not actively irritating and leading to app uninstalls? Push without clear measurement is meaningless, and in an ideal world you’ll be testing content on a regular basis to ensure you’re delivering the best possible performance from your campaigns.

If there’s one key lesson here it’s that any communication channel is only as good as the data and the thought behind it. And in the modern digital marketing era, that means a whole lot of work gathering, processing and making sense of data – ideally in real-time.

Lastly, like any other channel, push alone isn’t particularly effective. It works best in conjunction with other communication channels. Some of those are outside the native mobile environment, but not all are. And that brings us to our next topic – the fact that push is only part of the puzzle.

Beyond Just Push – The World Of Native Mobile Marketing
 

There’s one blindingly obvious limitation when it comes to push marketing. It can only be sent when the user is not in the app. As such, whilst it might do some sort of a job when it comes to simple messages that bring people back to the app, it fails in terms of delivering a rich marketing message at precisely the time when users are most likely to be responsive – when you already have their attention.

To do that, you’ll need to some of those other native mobile marketing techniques that we mentioned above, and two in particular.

The first of these are in-app campaigns. These are simply dynamic content and screens, delivered using the same intelligence we talked about above, to users who are already in the app. Think splash screens promoting sale items or personalized offers for users – although that is only the tip of the iceberg.

These campaigns typically have response rates up above 50% – compared to somewhere between 1% and 5% for push campaigns. And that’s no surprise, because when they are well targeted and triggered at the right time, they are giving the user just what they need when they need it. Now is not the time to go into great detail about all the ways in which these campaigns can drive the numbers in your mobile business, but a brief read through this blog post will certainly put you in the picture.

The second is the editing of the app UX itself. To some, this might not sound like marketing, but to those people we would point out that ‘Product’ has always been one of the 4 Ps of marketing, and changing or personalizing user experience is a very direct and effective way of moving mobile metrics. We’ve had customers increase engagement rates by 50% through simple UX changes relating to navigation.

These techniques are both direct and effective. And they work best when used together, and alongside (not instead of) push notifications. Smart, integrated marketing campaigns of this type are a million miles away from the borderline-spam approach of push alone.

And Beyond Native Mobile Marketing…

 

Finally (and mercifully briefly), it’s worth noting that we have not yet even touched on the world beyond native mobile. But of course, for the consumer, there is not necessarily a clear distinction between the mobile app, the desktop website, or indeed even the bricks-and mortar store.

Standalone push is ignorant of this outside world, whereas an integrated mobile marketing platform most certainly is.

That matters – for two very simple reasons:

• Native mobile data in terms of behavior in the app and response to native mobile campaigns can inform campaigns in other channels. Some of those, such as web push and email, are relatively adjacent and tools that most digital marketers will want in their armory.
• The campaigns you deliver on native mobile (including push) can be informed by data from outside that space. So for example, a push campaign or an in-app message can be shown to users who have browsed a particular item on desktop internet.

Unless push is linked – ideally in real-time – with the wider marketing infrastructure, it simply isn’t possible to provide this kind of 360° experience. Another reason why mobile marketing is about so much more than push notifications!

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how chatbots will be amazing at upgrading the viability and benefit of your specialists.

While technology replacing humans continues to be a point of anxiety for some, bots are intended to make humans more effective and valuable not less

Recently, Facebook declared the next digital frontier would centre on artifical intelligence (AI)-powered chatbots and their inevitable rise, driven in no small part by the company’s own expansion into the bot space via its Messenger platform.

The news elicited no shortage of attention from the media and for good reason. Certainly, chatbots deliver a ton of genuinely innovative functionality, and they reflect our increasing preference for self-service customer service.

Forrester reports that 70% of customers prefer sourcing information from a company website rather than using phone or email. Meanwhile, on the business side, live-agent calls average anywhere from $5-9 per call, and an interactive voice response (IVR) or interactive text response (ITR) interaction can be as cheap as 20p.

But do bots really represent the next big thing in AI-powered self-service? Will they replace apps? Could they act as a replacement for customer service agents? Or are they simply a passing Silicon Valley fad? Most likely, the truth lies somewhere in the middle, but it is certainly no fad.

First, it’s worth exploring the origins of chatbots and why they seem to have piqued the industry’s interest recently. After all, the technologies at the core of Facebook’s bots, as well as others, aren’t particularly new – they’ve been on smartphones for years. And while it’s true these technologies are getting better, that fact alone doesn’t justify the limelight AI-powered chatbots currently enjoy.

Instead, Facebook’s push into chatbots has a lot more to do with getting users to interact with Messenger in new ways and, critically, for longer periods of time.

Similar to messaging apps like WeChat, Facebook is exploring new functionality unrelated to messaging, which includes features like QR scanning, mobile payments and, yes, bots.

In situations where a customer would be interacting with a human operator via a live chat prompt, a bot can skillfully handle much of that workload at a fraction of the cost and likely with greater speed and accuracy.

However, that still has not eliminated the need for the human touch in the customer journey at certain points.

Customer service bots like the ones Facebook is currently hyping have been available on some messaging platforms like WeChat for some time but they’ve made minimal headway in the space. Purely based on the technology, that might seem surprising but the truth comes down to the way customers want to be served information.

The best customer experience involves one continuous, seamless journey, where the conversation is contextualised and can take place across all voice and digital channels.

The limitations in something like a chatbot in Facebook’s Messenger platform challenge the natural tendencies of how humans operate – at least in the current time.

Another point of conversation is around the potential for bots to replace humans as customer service agents. But while technology replacing humans continues to be a point of anxiety for some, bots are intended to make humans more effective and valuable – not less.

Bots can handle many of the basic customer experience tasks, but certainly not all. When journey and life events become more complex, the complementary nature of AI and human engagement still guarantees exceptional relationships.

For the CX industry, it’s fair to say that bots offer a compelling value proposition in that they promise to streamline contact center tasks and make human operators more efficient and really more valuable.

It’s critical, though, that they be designed into the overall customer journey rather than siloed into a separate ecosystem. For chatbots to be a viable CX tool going forward, organisations must become adept at managing them within the context of an omnichannel user experience. 

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