Chris Knight
Many businesses look at their chatbot as a mundane tool for dealing with simple customer queries. But when it comes to successful bots, having fun with, or making a strong impression on your customers can help turn a tool into a pleasurable experience. Here’s how just a few companies have been rewarded for going that little bit further.
A bot should be more than a button on a website, it should entice users across the whole company presence to get engaged. Many businesses are going to greater lengths to drive bot awareness, or make their VA or AI presence something worth remembering.
While the fuss rumbles on about the Colin Kaepernick recent Nike advert, the company continues to push technology in its marketing. A recent Facebook Messenger chatbot used AR to make a big impression on customers in the endless drive to sell the latest trainers.
The bot used AR and imagery to help build in cachet and exclusivity about the products, which sold out in an hour. Whatever the subject, consumers are impressed if the technology looks good enough and helps add some excitement or drama around a product.
DuoLingo makes its language learning tools based around fun, and the company’s chatbot is just the latest example. While you might love or hate the term gamification, this is one use where the term is justified and actually beneficial to the process.
Helping people overcome the fear of talking to someone using another language, a chatbot is a perfect way to start learners off, with none of the embarrassment factor. The bot helps pupils of all ages learn those key conversational skills and practice what they learned. The bots take on the role of a persona, like a taxi driver or restaurant chef to make conversations appropriate to each lesson.
The higher up the business food chain you go, the greater quality your digital presence has to be. So, major bank UBS went pretty much the whole hog, and "cloned" its Chief Economist, Daniel Kalt, so he can virtually meet with multiple clients using video chat.
Clients get the chat and the full smart-suited business presence, but Mr. Kait can be on a flight, relaxing at home or hosting multiple meetings at once and still look unruffled. Advisors can act as Mr Kait if he is unavailable and still put forward a professional presence.
Who has time to read through a car manual before they set off for a test drive or their first road trip? With cars getting more smart features and dials or buttons to operate them, they look more like a flight deck than a car. Mercedes Benz solution is a chatbot app that the driver can ask about what a button or feature does, they can also take photos of buttons to help get information about what they do.
A digital manual saves on paper, and helps the driver get answers to their immediate questions without having to flap through endless pages and indexes. The augmented reality feature helps when people don’t know the right words for particular objects on the dash, a clever advance that could be used in more bots.
Any store has a great opportunity to promote their chatbot beyond the front page of a website or on their social media. One of the best examples is Lidl’s Margot sommelier chatbot. The instructions show how to access the bot in simple terms and it doesn’t make any gaudy claims beyond being a wine expert. Users can help find the right wine to go with their meal, a pure and well devised feature.
Whatever your business needs, bots are easier to build than you might expect, even with added AI features like natural language processing and launching them on multiple platforms. Check out SnatchBot for a practical cloud-platform for any business bot.
