Chatbots & Voice Assistants for Success

WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Telegram and Signal are playing an increasingly important role in users’ everyday lives, and messages are usually attributed at a very high level of importance. For many users, new messages are always displayed on a cell phone’s lock screen and thus attract their full attention. Unlike other social media applications, users do not have to actively go to the platform, but messages are delivered passively to their screens. News and messages can thus be communicated much more directly and quickly using instant messaging tools.

Marketing is challenged to respond and make use of these new communication routines of customers. Marketing activities should therefore pick up people where they already are – on WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, etc.

Automation with the help of chatbots can simplify and accelerate many processes. Chatbots are text-based messenger systems that enable written communication (“chatting”) with a computer system. The use of artificial intelligence can further expand the fields of application and minimize the susceptibility to errors.

Nevertheless, customers are the deciding factor:
The basic prerequisite for a successful chatbot is a clear strategy and a plan to target the right group of customers during the implementation stage.

A prime example of the use of a chatbot is “Telefónica Deutschland”. The company sells mobile and fixed-network connections under the name O2 and relies on chatbots, among other things, for customer relationship management. The chatbot “Lisa – our virtual online helper” was set up on O2’s website and succeeded in reducing the volume of customer service inquiries by around 8,000 contacts per week. The chatbot can process 55 percent of the inquiries in a few seconds. The rest of the inquiries have to be released manually by employees, whereby the response time is short taking only a couple of minutes.

Another well-known chatbot is “Kim”, which is used on the “Maggie Kochstudio” website. The chatbot of the world’s largest food company Nestlé, can access more than 3,000 different cooking recipes; programmed to suggests recipes and cooking tips depending on the time of day. The platform used is Facebook Messenger, which is commonly used among their target customers.

Voice assistants (also called intelligent personal assistants or mobile assistants), unlike chatbots, aim to communicate by voice: They can perform specific actions based on spoken instructions. They can be implemented in custom apps, on websites, in instant messenger tools, on social media platforms, or even in custom hardware components. The technology has now found its way onto many devices. The three best-known systems are currently Alexa from Amazon, Google Assistant, and Siri from Apple.

Similar to chatbots, the so-called voicebots provide users with answers to various questions. The functionality is similar to instant messaging tools, just with an additional step of converting speech into text for further processing.

Smartphones, for example iPhones with Siri, were the first devices to be equipped with voice assistants. In recent years, intelligent assistants have increasingly found their way into households, driven primarily by Amazon Echo (a speaker connected to the Internet). In the future, cars will also come with assistants, which will further accelerate the proliferation of these systems.