Over the past few months, there has been a media swarm around chat bots. Some wonder if the simulated computer software programs (most recently popularized within messaging applications like Facebook Messenger) will replace humans in a variety of jobs, while others speculate about just how helpful the technology really is to businesses. It seems that virtually everyone is talking about bots, including marketers.

Chat bots are the latest evolution in a long legacy of technologies changing the way consumers interact with companies.

But how did we reach this point? After all, enthusiasm for chatbots represents a significant strategic shift for brands and publishers, whose customer engagement efforts in recent years have been geared primarily towards keeping customers within the ‘walled gardens’ of native mobile apps.

So why should you consider chatbots as a strategy for user engagement and acquisition?

Every invention from telephones to social media has made businesses more accessible to consumers, and chat bots are no exception.

Opening up of major messaging platforms to brand-owned conversational marketing represents a significant opportunity. Through chatbot development via Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, WeChat, and Line, brands can reach a combined audience of four billion users.

It’s an invaluable opportunity to engage with consumers in an individual, personalized way within the services they are already using, rather than brands demanding users come to them in their owned apps.

Increasingly, those most-used services are messaging apps, rather than social media sites, as they evolve into ‘one-stop shops’, baking in capabilities that would previously have commanded their own apps, such as search, eCommerce, and customer service.

Where Asian companies such as Line and WeChat have led in terms of the creation of consolidated ‘super platforms’, the likes of Facebook (with updates to Messenger) and Google (with the launch of Allo) are following.

Not only are chatbots revolutionizing the whole customer-service interaction, it also has the potential to fit well into the digital context framework. Chatbots can function to provide deep context, quick resolution of struggle and need (reducing the gap from thinking to doing), and support the way consumers like to interact, namely through messaging and getting things done by themselves (self-service).

Some might say, this is exaggeration, but believe it or not chatbots have the potential to change smartphones. Chatbots are a much less arduous investment, and can be much more easily updated on-the-fly to improve the user experience based on real-time usage data, rather than having to ensure lengthy app update cycles (and relying on users to update their apps at all). Chatbots are also an ‘always on’ channel in a way that native apps cannot be.

Renowned software developer and lead developer at Tumblr Marco Arment recently published a blog post in which he suggested that AI-led services such as chatbots have the potential to completely upturn what smartphones are for, in much the same way as apps once did.

It’s an interesting — and exciting — thought, considering the seismic impact that apps have had on consumers, brands, and marketers.

So, it is certainly easy to imagine ‘bot shops’ becoming the new App Stores, as the underlying tech becomes more sophisticated, consumers become more comfortable engaging with AI and more brands experiment with implementing conversational marketing. Thus, marketers have the opportunity to find great value from the chat bot trend and help solidify the technology as a key part of the customer-service experience, but only if they get it right the first time. In the world of customer service, second chances are no guarantee.

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