Chatbots Popping Up Everywhere, Should Your Business Jump On Board?
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) - Is your business ready for the bots?
The technology to simulate conversation with a computer has been around for decades, but companies like Facebook and Microsoft are embracing "chatbots" in hopes of enabling more interaction with customers.
With Chatbots, people are able to message companies and publishers like they would message their friends.
Evan Urbania is the co founder of Chatterblast in Philadelphia and says while bots are nothing new, the technology is getting better:
"From IVR, which is those voice systems on your banks customer service, to Siri to Amazon echo, we've had these interactions with voice devices or message for quite some time now. Bots are just taking it to the next level and the next platform which is Facebook Messenger, Slack, WhatsApp and your text messaging. The behavior's not new, it's just now all this data's here and the opportunity there."
The idea is that chatbots will eventually help us easily find anything that we're looking for, without having to call, search the web, or open multiple apps.
"I think the big thing that bots do represent though is that as we start to personalize them," says Urbania, "there's going to be more integration, so you might connect your credit card and you might connect your Uber account or your GrubHub account so that you can have this integrated experience, which is the holy grail of personalization on social that I think everyone is looking for."
He says for small businesses, there could be some big opportunity:
"If you're a fitness studio or a gym, could you be answering questions about workouts or responding to people's concerns about food calorie intake? That kind of stuff could be really cool and could it siphon off some of your normal channels and email or things getting lost, absolutely."
Facebook rolled out Bots for Messenger a month ago and claims it's already showing signs of success.
"Facebook is trying to be the ubiquitous leader here," Urbania says, "and to keep us there and have us have these interactions there, I don't know if that's going to pan out.
I don't know if we all want to interact with every single brand on Facebook Messenger."
According to Messenger's head of product, tens of thousands of developers are jumping on.
There are 2.5 billion users of messaging apps.
