Customer Experience bots in 2019: Don’t ignore their importance

Interactions with bots are quickly becoming the norm and for us and our partners at Oracle, it’s not hard to see why, with more than 300,000 active bots (and that number growing) on Facebook’s Messenger every day.

According to Gartner, by 2020, the average person will have more conversations with bots (such as Oracle's Digital Assitant) than with their spouse, whether they know about it or not. Furthermore, over 30% of web-browsing will be done through a bot via a messenger platform by the end of the decade.

This may seem far-fetched to some, but I recall a recent experience where I was out and about and needed to check flight prices to Iceland for an upcoming trip. Rather than engage through the website of a flight comparison service, I chose to give their Facebook Messenger a go on my mobile. The result was a far more convenient, intuitive and mobile-friendly experience than using the traditional browser channel.

So, for those organisations that haven’t “botified” their Customer Experience, what are the key advantages to deploying a bot to their social & digital channels? I’ve outlined my top three below.

Automated and convenient customer journey #

Bots can be placed across your digital landscape and embedded into your social channels, giving your customers the ability to interact with you when they want to, how they want to. Enabling a bot to automate customer interactions and make real-time decisions empowers customers to service their query when it's convenient to them and alleviates pressure on the call centre in the process.

Consistent brand experience #

Unlike many of us, bots don’t get Monday blues, or feel the strains of a long working week, meaning that when a customer interacts with a bot, they get a consistent brand experience no matter what day of the week or time of day they interact.

With only 37% of marketeers from a global survey believing that all employees understand how they deliver the brand promise to the customer, it’s time to trust the bots.

Data-driven personalisation #

Speak to any digital marketeer and they’ll tell you how crucial personalisation is when ensuring your customers stay loyal. Today’s connected enterprise artificial intelligence (AI) bots use information from different channels and your internal systems to make smarter, more personalised responses to customers, giving them everything they need at their fingertips.

Oracle bots (the Digital Assistant) #

85% of all customer service interactions will be handled by bots in under two years' time and Oracle are taking this technology very seriously. As you may have seen from my colleague, Luis Figueira’s OpenWorld Debrief post, Oracle have recently re-launched their bot offering as the Oracle Digital Assistant, bringing new pre-loaded skills to the existing conversational user interface.These skills will empower the bot to ‘know’ how to perform basic tasks out-of-the-box, bringing it more in line with services such as Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant.

We’ll be posting soon on how we’re successfully delivering Oracle bot technology to our customers, but in the meantime, feel free to reach out if you’d like to learn about how chatbots can benefit your organisation and customers.