Marketing
Giving Business a Boost with Artificial Intelligence
Artificial intelligence is powering direct and personalized interactions with customers. This isn’t something any of us can afford to ignore! Here are some of the ways you can start to use AI to boost your business.
New & Improved: Customer Service
Facebook announced this past April the availability of tools for developers to build bots inside Facebook Messenger – such as an API that allows developers to bring chat bots for Messenger and chat widgets for the web. This change brings a range of new functions to Messenger, which can become a primary channel for businesses to interact with customers – replacing 1-800 numbers. Similarly, Microsoft now has a bot API in Skype, and other messaging apps have also released parallel functionality.
Exactly how does all this change customer service? Well, as one example, have a look at KLM. Their new service is called KLM on Messenger. They’ve rolled out Messenger bots for accessing flight data. And by the way, airlines are already some of the biggest users of customer service via Twitter. Now, it looks like consumers are likely to try asking their questions using direct messenger. To meet this need, a growing range of startups are working hard on creating solutions for the many companies who want to adopt this new and improved, AI customer service.
Branding Bots: Yes We Can!
Bots now have the capability of having unique personalities – something akin to the tone-of-voice document that used to be common in corporate environments to ensure brands had a consistent voice and presence across social media channels. If you’re working with bots, you’ll want to work to ensure your bots reflect your brand and integrate your brand’s characteristics into how the bots act, based on defined brand traits.
Being Proactive & Picking Up the Slack
With the new technology, cutting-edge and sophisticated marketing tools will soon be changing the marketing experience by providing all of us with proactive recommendations. Soon, we’ll be able to ask questions of our favorite tools. And these same tools will be making suggestions while providing super-quick data and analytics.
And We’re Just at the Beginning
This year, don’t ignore the bots. Instead, explore the options. Beyond things like personalized customer service, the question is how you can leverage AI at all points of the customer journey to differentiate your business and offer added value to customers. If embraced by the general public, bots could become an important new channel that’s used in commerce, for customer support, and perhaps even for media.