Fancy talking to robots?

I recently attended a seminar on chatbots. How was it? For me, mind blowing! Haters gonna hate, but some will find it lifesaving! Do you feel you are a chatty person? Then, hail the chatbot era, because it will amaze you! Your shopping experience can be fast, but also fun! The descendants of Siri and Alexa are here to help you. Let’s have a quick overview of the basics!

Dr. Vassos - who gave the lecture- made it very simple for us to understand; he has a Phd after all! So, what are chatbots? “This is an "app-in-app" experience: instead of downloading a different app for every case, e.g., brand or service, the user can just "talk to" the corresponding persona in the chat app” (Vassos,2017).

How can they change the shopping experience we knew so far? You ask a question and the bot answers to you instantly. One of the best reasons to do that is that it is fast. Also, it can give you helpful suggestions, that you hadn’t thought of. Take a look at Sephora’s reservation assistant or the Sephora virtual artist and you won’t stop talking to it! The last is a shade-matching chatbot that identifies lip color to match uploaded photos! Crazy right?

Another well known company to experiment on bots is Burberry, where messaging can be fun and engaging. Trust me I tested it! But a not so good case presents no other than Tommy Hilfiger Company. Parlo (2016), describes step by step his experience with Artificial Intelligence, where things were not so positive. He says that guided product discovery was successful, whereas product shopping could use some refining, since it had bugs like not recognizing all the products in cart and not responding to the point.

However, this does not come as big surprise. “The promise is that you will be carrying on a conversation with the bot, and understanding human language is a really hard problem. Therefore, we shouldn’t be setting the expectation that users are going to be having a “chat” with a bot.” (source: botnerds.com) Well, at least for now, because this may change fast!

The foreseeing is that the chatbot trend will grow. Perhaps, the “there is an app for that” will be replaced by the chatbots. Peeples, (2016) argues that brands could benefit greatly by the use of chatbots, because it finds the user exactly where they are: chatting and texting.

Sources:

Parlo. Tommy Hilfiger Bot: Artificial Intelligence Gone Wrong. Retrieved from: https://chatbotslife.com/tommy-hilfiger-bot-artificial-intelligence-gone-wrong-90a545ac9a20#.c5b3u55kd

Peeples, D. (2016). To Bot or Not to Bot. Here Come the Chatbots. Retrieved from: http://www.advertisingweek.com/360/article/-to-bot-or-not-to-bot-here-come-the-chatbots

Taylor, S. (2016). Very Human Lessons From Three Brands That Use Chatbots To Talk To Customers. Retrieved from: https://www.fastcompany.com/3064845/human-lessons-from-brands-using-chatbots

Vassos, S. Intor to Chatbots. Retrieved from: http://slides.com/stavrosvassos/intro-to-chatbots#

http://botnerds.com/types-of-bots/

#chatbots #shopping