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Moving beyond basic customer support and services, chatbots are the ideal digital platform for political leaders, business marketers, PR and others to drive engagement and gain a better understanding of their voters, fans or customers.

A little bit of political chat

Politicians and pollsters are screaming to find more about the voting intentions of increasingly radical and disenfranchised electorates around the world. Chatbots create a tool to gain more subtle insights into voting habits, as well as more immediate reactions to policy decisions, news appearances and trends among their faithful (or not so) voters. Chatbots played a low-key part in the 2015/16 elections in major nations, but as all sides look for insight expect them to be huge in 2020 votes.



Check out what U.S. Republican tech guru Adam Meldrum says on the subject, as campaigns become stories where bots can play a key part. They can use AI to gauge loyalty or anger, and help get the vote out on the big day.

Beyond politics, in the drive to win and keep customers, to generate leads and to help boost the shareability of social media posts, contests and surveys have long been a fun part of the marketing arsenal.

They allow for specific feedback, a short burst of engagement that can be as fun or serious as required, plus, the chance to win something fun Boost that with the power of a chatbot, and people can better express their opinion beyond the usual X,Y,Z or “don’t like”/”like” options that most surveys corral users toward. The benefit of the bot is that its AI and natural language recognition features can create the same set of data-based results, based on what the user says, giving them the choice to say what they mean.

That makes them more likely to complete the survey rather than getting fed up with not being able to give a real opinion. It makes them more likely to share it, especially if there’s a prize on offer at the end, and as the survey is delivered more like a natural conversation, they are more likely to respond less mechanically.

That allows the AI or NLP to parse the language for positive and negative sentiment and give each answer a rating. It can also highlight and store key phrases that can help marketers or campaign managers better understand the response to say new adverts or other promotional material.

Bots can also push new surveys to users as part of regular conversations, or common transactions, with a typical “if you have a minute can you help us with this…” preface. This helps change the way customers can get involved with a brand or business, and how the company can send out new types of messaging.

Its competition time

Alongside polls and surveys, competitions can also benefit from an overhaul via a chatbot interface. For a start, the bot can have an individual conversation with each customer to find out some useful details. Using Facebook Messenger bots for a contest creates more options to engage and for wider levels of interaction over say Twitter follow/reposts and other methods.

Say a car brand is offering a new model as a prize, the bot can ask if customers are interested in buying the new model at some point in the future, what their budget might be and so on, as part of the entry process. This often comes across as staid delivery when delivered in a contest entry form or the hell that is Pollfish-type interfaces. With a chatbot, it becomes part of the natural process and whatever the brand or prize, a few questions can help gather extra data to provide key marketing information.

Bots are also a natural way to run quizzes and other contests, all helping a company reach out to the audience, find out more about them, and get them used to using chatbots as a point of engagement that can easily become a way to access customer support, sales tools and other ways to do business.