Our clients are already using artificial intelligence when communicating with their customers in a chat interface. There is increasing focus on the digitalisation and automation of processes. This is why chatbots are on everyone’s lips these days – precisely because they are a way of digitalising and automating the customer dialogue.
The yardstick is a global one, and customers expect to be acknowledged within seconds. Flawless solutions make for the best customer experience. That is why you have to place the bar at the right height and not jump where everyone else jumps.
Personalisation will soon become hyper-personalisation
Investment in big data and AI must be part of a broader picture. Knowit advises its clients to bear this in mind when designing infrastructure and other systems. If you let this way of thinking permeate the entire organisation, the path to exploiting the value that the data holds is very short indeed – not only to today’s business problems but those of the future, too.
In terms of the customer journey, we believe that the future for many sectors will be personal assistants. The way in which we interact with websites and apps will be robustly challenged by message-based interaction.
Big data, artificial intelligence and chatbots will all be at the heart of this trend. Big data as a basis for all calculations and insights, artificial intelligence that makes decisions for the company, that advises customers and personalises the interaction with each customer. The chatbot is the window to the customer.
Customer dialogue has already taken big strides towards chat and messaging services, while speech is on its way out. In the wake of this trend, there are great opportunities opening up for adopting new and exciting technologies to automate parts of the customer dialogue.
We have now reached a point where messaging platforms have overtaken the use of social media. In other words, customers are spending more time on Messenger, WhatsApp, Skype, etc. than on Facebook and Twitter. It is also important to remember that digitalisation is as important to customers as it is to companies. When customers go digital, businesses have to follow. It is all about being where your customers are.
What does it take to succeed with a chatbot?
The worst thing you can do is believe that advanced technology is the path to success. The smartest bot is not necessarily the best. The objective is to solve a task more easily, quicker and better than an alternative process. It is all about the customer experience.
How do you create a good customer experience? With customer insight. You have to know where the customer wants to find the bot, which questions they want answers to, how they feel about being assisted by a machine rather than a human, and how they want the bot to communicate with them.