Customer Care and The Bot Continuum

Thanks to Mark Zuckerberg and the introduction of an API that makes it easy for developers to create “chatbots” on Facebook, marketing and customer care professionals have to come to grips with “Bots.” As Casey Newton in The Verge explains, with more than 900 million people using messenger on a regular basis, Zuck sees bots “replacing 1–800 numbers with a mix of artificial intelligence and human intervention.”

Contact center operators around the world have to take note. Long-time toll-free marketer, 1–800-FLOWERS was part of the demo at F8 (Facebook’s developer conference). In his keynote Zuckerberg noted that “You never have to call 1–800-FLOWERS again.” His declaration serves as a wake-up call to enterprise marketing, customer care and contact center operations professionals. Fortunately, there is ample time and available technology to help react rationally, rather than overreact to the threat of an impending Botsplosion.

Long-time developers of the automated systems that spider Web content (aka “search bots”), malicious impersonators of people (aka “spam bots”) or other flavors of special-purpose programs designed to spoof human behaviors (“chatbots”) have to be wondering why the world is so excited that the largest social network in existence is about to make it easier for more bots to enter their walled garden.

Yet the Facebook discussion should not be about Bots at all. The company has made considerable investment in intellectual property and human resources to support a formidable Intelligent Assistance offering, starting with its acquisition of wit.ai in January 2015. At that time wit.ai had already attracted over 6,000 developers to experiment with its tools for building domain-specific grammars capable of quickly recognizing the purpose of a call or message and understanding a caller or texter’s intent.

If Zuckerberg’s vision is fulfilled, Facebook’s walled garden will be the fertile soil not so much for bots, but for Intelligent Assistants (Either live advisors or AI-based Bots) that promote conversational commerce and foster loyalty between customers and their selected brands.

When customers ask questions, seek reservations or make purchases, all will be carried out as “conversational commerce” on Facebook Messenger. As this use case from October 2015 demonstrates, the messages exchanged between customer and company establish a “canonical thread” documenting the ongoing conversation, and therefore relationship, between a customer and the company.

Customer care professionals should evaluate the opportunity to reach Facebook’s 1.6 billion registered users. They should do it in a way that leverages existing infrastructure to support low-latency, text-based automated marketing, sales and support activities. In the long run, Facebook’s position as metadata accumulator and transaction initiator should breed distrust from individuals who what to take better control of their digital activities.

As with Facebook M (a Messenger-based recommendation resource that’s gotten quite a bit of attention) the resource exchanging messages customer’s Messenger Directory is not necessarily a Bot. Instead, it is the ingress into a company’s text-based customer care platform, which has routing logic, business logic and knowledge management capabilities that also power Web chat, agent chat and more automated Intelligent Assistants.

As a customer care professional, one must regard Facebook Messenger as yet another customer care “channel.” It may invoke its own natural language understanding, machine learning and response engine. But it may just decide to send the message on to an enterprise where it can employ its own routing logic, business logic and knowledge management to provide the proper response. Its fate as a preferred repository for personal data and metadata (such as activity streams, vendor preferences, payment preferences, loyalty programs, and the like) should be up to each individual customer.

Balancing humans (contact center agents, advisors and subject matter experts) with automated resources (Siri, Alexa, GoogleNow, Nina, and the plethora of Enterprise Intelligent Assistants) is core to the presentations and discussions at next week’s Intelligent Assistants Conference in London. It is a “must attend” event for customer care and contact center professionals.