Needless to say, we are living through uncertain times. How the months ahead go will depend a lot on our actions as individuals, as companies, and as nations. The pace of technology has fortunately brought us new ways to communicate with each other and keep touch with each other. …

Intro Two years ago, I wrote my first draft of a chatbot taxonomy. My goal was to establish a common framework that could be used to identify different kinds of chatbots, shedding light onto what was then a brand-new technology. Years later, the market has matured — as has our understanding…

Intro Throughout 2019, I’ve shared my thoughts on more than a few topics around the future of customer service — everything from why E-mail, Phone, and Helpcenters will all fall out of favour (they are all inferior interfaces — slower, less mobile-friendly, and/or asynchronous — compared to text chat) to The…

Intro Business leaders often say things like “we are a data driven company” or “we take decisions based on data”. This is a good mantra in principle. But “being data driven” is about more than adding it to a list of company values. Data needs to be done right. Let’s…

Mary Meeker has released a yearly Internet Trend Report every year since 1995. Her analyses are always interesting and insightful, but this year’s report in particular contained a slide that has stuck with me. I am talking about Slide 157, which includes a chart that looks something like this: Technology…

Neither rule-based nor algorithmic chatbots are a silver bullet. Each of them has certain use cases where they are strong, and others where they fall short. Here, I will explain the difference between the two and share my theories on when we should use which type of bot. Rules = Explicit programming In this…

At Solvemate we have built a software where our customers can create chatbots to automate customer service. Our bots deal exclusively with messaging interfaces such as chat widgets and Facebook Messenger. We do not support voice. Quite often I get asked — “why?” Calling has been around since 1876…

The situation All businesses are under pressure to keep processes lean and costs low. That means expensive customer service is fundamentally problematic: Serving thousands of customers creates an immense pressure for support agents to be efficient. No wonder they often sound stressed on the phone. Today, I want to take an in-depth…

We live now in an instant economy, where as societies, we expect to get everything on demand. It’s almost a daily reality, where products appear on our doorstep within 24 hours and the newest episodes of our favourite series are just a click of a button away. The shift has…