Marketers are returning to analysing their entire offering, exploring how to automate to improve service, offer greater value and reduce cost. From a broader, contemporary marketing mix, Productivity, Process, Personalisation and Physical & Digital Touch are the forces of strategic marketing priority as we head into 2018.
Beneath the strategic approach are six trends that are set to dominate marketing efforts for the year ahead: Chat bots, Security, CX, AI, the mobile rethink and disruption. In this series of blogs we’ll look at each of these trends in more detail, starting with Chat bots.
Chat bots conceived in 2017 will be implemented throughout 2018. Many more will be planned and launched throughout the year ahead.
For the uninitiated, a chat bot is a program that simulates a human conversation with a customer. In their current form, chat-bots are usually part of a desktop experience or mobile app. Chat bots can live natively on an organisations’ own website/app or on third party messaging platforms such as Whats-App or Facebook Messenger. The rise of chat-bots fits perfectly into a landscape where consumers are looking to communicate privately rather than through public social channels.
Chat-bot growth is the result of customer demand for instant service solutions, rather than wasting time queueing, on hold or waiting for a representative to find an adequate answer.
According to Aspect, 3 out of 4 consumers prefer to use technology to solve customer service issues on their own.
Chat-bots have the capability to deliver at speed, scale and accuracy. A well designed solution is good for both customers and businesses. A well planned chat bot is able to interpret customer questions and respond contextually (considering a customer's history and conversations on other channels).
The chat bot will analyse commonly occurring service issues and respond immediately with a highly personalised solution.
While some early chat-bots have been let down by their hurried implementation - don't be fooled! A chat bot can automate the thought processes of your best customer service staffer.
Once a pattern is “locked-in” the chat bot can perform a function faster, with infinite scale and more cost effectively than the human equivalent. Chat-bots will quickly be powered by more complex and valuable algorithms. They will also migrate to voice channels, where they will interpret tone of voice as a data variable, guiding the appropriate emotion in the bots’ own response.
Next up we’ll look a t security, but you can get the full CX & Martech Mega Trends 2018 white paper here.
Acknowledgments
Aspect Research. Customer CX.
