Since the online world players Facebook, Microsoft and Google introduced their bot functions to the public, bots seem to belong to one of THE most important online trends of the year. This topic and its various applications possibilities thus create exciting development conditions for our digital specialists of our team. How do such chatbots work, which possibilities do they provide and what can we expect in the future? We specifically dealt with the topic and developed our very first own Bot.
Chat(ro)bot – What on earth is that?!
“Simply put, a chatbot is like a personal assistant which directly communicates via Facebook messenger. The bot responds to questions like in a “real” conversation. It easily enables users to get information about products and services and even allows them to make table reservations”, so says our developer Oliver Schwarz.
Current examples for the use of bots can be found among flight bookings (KLM), Orders for driving-services (Uber), News (CNN) up to online shopping (Zalando). Lars Urban, Chief Creative Officer (CCO) thinks that there is even more potential for bot applications than in the fields of online shopping and order services. Especially for location based services there is much potential. So chatbots work for almost every imaginable use case and are thus worldwide applicable.
To gain some experience our development unit created a rudimentary chatbot based in the location based field.
How does that work?
As usual for bots users can easily start the conservation with a simple “Hello” and the virtual chat partner gives first instructions which questions the user can ask and which answers he receives to certain topics. A possible bot conversation could look like that:
Users who seek for information or send their position automatically receive selected locations from the bot. The bot then tries to interpret the user input correctly. If there are any misunderstandings, the community manager can always intervene into the chat and formulate specific answers. Next to the text-oriented answers (text templates) the bot presents the equivalent location results or product details in a “generic” template provided by Facebook. The search results are provided in one or more provided APIs.
Where are the benefits for brands and what are the implement possibilities?
At first sight a bot seems to be more economic than an own app. But appearances are deceitful. The expensive efforts to maintain the bot and optimize it to respond user demands correctly long for consistent wording extensions. Still, bots enable to purposefully answer the user’s demands as they are active on their own and don’t operate according to app-predicted themes. So a broader range of potential users is reached as the usage of Facebook and its messenger is widely common. Users don’t have to adapt to the new usability of an app, nothing need to be downloaded and as additional login and payment fees are avoided, many smartphone users may be tempted to prefer the bot to an app. Additionally, the general data of the user contained in Facebook profiles helps to improve services and products.
Clearly, the question comes up whether all this is more like the new technical gimmick or whether there is real sales potential. In most cases that will be found in the selling of products and services but also the huge range will definitely generate revenues.
How does the future of bots look like?
With their many advantages bots are a smart alternative to traditional apps. In the U.S.A. it is already possible to pay via the Facebook messenger, which most probably will also come to Germany in the near future. In that case the bot can process the complete costumer journey and thus a new revenue channel is created.
To better answer the various user demands, Facebook should definitely provide more flexible templates for bot conversations. Even Google and WhatsApp are now working on bot solutions. In addition to that, there are chatbots for Telegram, Slack and Amazon Echo. Consequently, we stay tuned and also develop different bots for various use cases.