E-Commerce: Bots Will Take Over From Traditional Websites!
It is about time to disrupt the concept of building Websites and optimizing them through A/B-Testing, Heatmaps, Eyetracking or whatsoever we have tried for 20+ years!
From HTML hard-coded pages to Microsoft FrontPage to Content Management Systems (CMS): The basic experience of what users find when putting a URL into their browser has not changed ever since the Internet got commercialized:
You end on a webpage were the look and feel, the design, fonds, colors and so on are dictated by the corporate style guide. You identify the navigational points offered to you, guess where you might find what you seek, click on it and continue to do so until you get to whatever you are looking for. Or you leave with wrecked nerves.
Such kind of User Experience is the norm. People are used to it for roughly 20 years now. They are used to a one-size-fits-all User Experience. They are used to experience nothing close to a one-to-one customer communication. At best (from a business point of view) they get some ads or content shown based on whatever browser data, device data and the cookies inside their cache reveal about the site visitor.
It is time to disrupt the old concept of a hierarchy of pages linked to one another.
It is time for Bots to take center stage!
Yes, the last 25 years have helped educate people into how to “use the internet”, means searching websites or searching via Google.
But as a business you want to engage with people coming to your Website in mutually fruitful and beneficial exchange.
Google wants you to offer content, keywords and well structured headlines. Prospects, customers, stakeholders and others want answers or problems solved but they do not want webpages linked to one another and beautifully animated drop-down menues (yeah, I like them, too).
Why are homepages stuffed with everything that can be found in a company from latest product to newest animated picture slider? Why is there no friendly bot greeting you and asking you what you look for?
Content Management Systems are static assumptions of customer demand
A CMS is a large database. You want to really tell me that a Bot upon request, or after asking a few(!) questions, could not select proper products for presentation from a multi-media database? You really want to tell me customers and Bots could not narrow things down in a dialogue revealing more about users and their hierarchy of thoughts than clicks on links?
Plus, it spares the user from all the stuff on a website he or she did not come for! Post-visit analysis of the user-journey from link to link is more like watching how Tarzan swung from tree to tree! Dialogue data is more valuable, especially with data analysis and machine learning having improved quite a bit.
In 2000 I took part in relaunching the website of a Top 10 insurance company in Germany, where we also switched to a Content Management System. We had hierarchies, structure, pages, descriptions, keywords to help our site get ranked better in Search Engines.
16 years on and my ex-colleagues still offer the same User Experience — albeit in a new design. All competitors do the same as they always did. Their websites are ranked in Google and their products show up there when people look for them and if they click on a search result they end on a landing page and ideally can sign up for that insurance online.
Why do customers not get greeted by a friendly Bot when entering the website either on a homepage or on a landing page? In a department store a salesperson will come to you and ask if you’d like to have some assistance. In a restaurant a friendly receptionist greets you. On a website you are alone with your needs and a structure to explore all by yourself.
A Bot would turn a Website into a truly interactive showroom.
A dialogue would tie people stronger to a site. The “presentation mode” banks on people’s curiosity, their feeling of success with what they as individuals have found. The experience would be customer driven, not by the urgent needs of departments to see “their” product or service highlighted everywhere. People would no longer experience a one-size-fits-all Website policy! Instead they would experience a business trying to offer one-to-one communication and solutions.
Processes (aka the User Journey) could be designed to even allow for a switch from Bot to a human “Customer Care Agent” upon user request. Taking over from a dialogue with a Bot would be easier than starting human interaction from scratch or based on a display of “pages visited” to the “Customer Care Agent”.
Websites and Webpages are the norm. People got used to them over 20 years. Some have grown up with them! So we talk about a major disruption here and a complicated one. Because the Internet is supposed to be modern and new, any disruptive innovation in its use might be quickly rejected, for it is already up-to-date.
Bots interactively creating Poduct- or Service-Showrooms in a dialogue with the customer would finally bring one-to-one marketing to the internet!
Of course there are reasons why we ended up with Webpages like this. Most of all Google would fail to index products and services on a Botsite because it could not talk to the bot. Google needs a Website with content and its rules demand that you may not show their spiders content the human user would not see but show anything they would see.
But how much can businesses still afford to first of all please Google with the User Journey they offer?
Many businesses already draw more customers from Facebook than from Google Search. Within Apps like WeChat or within Facebook a dialogue based sale would be possible. Indeed Chat-Apps would be more than a natural environment for such Bots. Any E-Mail marketing effort also does not have to lead to the old fashioned Webpages. It could well lead to a Botpage ready to further engage with the customer. So this disruption might happen slowly. It could well start behind “closed doors” where customers only get after signing in.
I believe that well designed, dialogue-based customer experience with straight forward results delivered by a Botsite will be seen as superior to hopping from Webpage to Webpage reading content delivered via a CMS.
Yes, you can trigger delivering content, stored inside a CMS or with third-parties, into a website, based on browser data. But everything in customer interaction remains an assumption as long as it has not been said by the customer! So CMS platforms remain limited. They get only more complicated when trying to implement new functions. That makes them more costly.
Goodbye CMS, Hello Botsites
Learning Bots which put together Botpages in real-time dialogue with the customer are becoming more experienced and thus more successful over time and all by themselves without costly new coding.
Since the principle of a Bot drawing data and displaying it will not change, the software will not get more complicated. The complexity of data and growing content to show will be left for the Bot to sort out in a dialogue with the user. And again: It will get better all the time.
The need to structure huge amounts of products and services to make then accessible will no longer be. The 250+ insurances my ex-colleagues handle today are less than ten percent of the corporate offering, which a Bot could handle. Except for where laws ask for direct links to certain information, like here in Germany to the Imprint, the need for a CMS as we know it will cease. Costs and complexity will go down. Customer Interaction and individuality will be up.
Of course this disruption may also never happen if
- People feel the old system offers them more anonymity, which they want to maintain
- Dialogues with machines in other areas of life do not become an accepted, daily thing
- Google throws everybody out of their index who offers customer-dialogue based, individual Botpages, their spider cannot reach
- Social Media and Messenger Platforms do not create the APIs and room to conduct dialogue-based business inside them using Botpages
- People want to keep on clicking links on screens instead of saying or typing what they look for
Decide for yourself what you consider more likely.
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Follow me on MEDIUM or on Twitter Stephan Jaeckel
