Companies today are being challenged by consumers who are seeking real-time interaction with brands through text and messaging apps.
This is according to Pommie Lutchman, Founder and CEO at Ocular Technologies, speaking at Ocular Technologies Executive Forum in Johannesburg last week.
Lutchman says intelligent and automated messaging - driven by bots - has the potential to transform the way companies reach their customers.
Tobias Goebel, director, emerging technologies at Aspect Software, says the nature of communication is changing with more people using messaging apps to interact.
Phone calls are no longer the principal way to interact - and it's no longer just millennials who are using messaging apps to communicate.
Therefore, businesses need to also adopt real time communication mechanisms like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger to communicate and serve their customers, he continues.
According to Lutchman, through bots, the integration of communications channels that are easy to work with, contextual, real time or near real time and have the ability to meet a very specific objective, is now possible.
Consumers are not restricted any more by the media type, by geo location, by time of day or day of week to interact with a brand, adds Lutchman.
"Companies can interact with a fair amount of accuracy - holding a contextual bi-directional conversations with customers or potential customers for that matter, without having to invest in infrastructure and people to respond to queries."
However, Lutchman notes for bots to help companies in customer service they need to be intelligent, that is have some sort of brain power sitting behind them.
The power of bots is not so much about the communications mechanism, but the data that lies in the back end, he says.
"It shouldn't matter whether a customer is using Messenger, Twitter, Siri or WhatsApp - they should be able to get their query answered in real time and the replies should be contextual -and this is possible through accurate data."
In addition, Lutchman explains that natural language understanding processing is also a priority when building bots.
"The problems with the bots that are not working in today's contact centre environment is because of the programming that sits behind them. It is not free enough to be able to respond to natural language and that can lead to wrong messages communicated to the customer."
Share