Face to face with a chatbot. Meet a few representatives of conversational commerce.

For a few weeks now we can observe the growth of new trend called conversational commerce. Messaging platforms proved to be the best ground for building this new generation of virtual assistants — chatbots. More and more brands plan to build they strategy based on messengers and as far as we know it’s a right way to gain customers’ love and attention.

Our generation loves to talk, so it’s obvious that businesses should go into the direction of human interactions. Every day there are 60 billion messages sent worldwide via Messenger and WhatsApp. Jim Tomanchek from Adaptly notices that typical messenger user is loyal and always online. We use those platforms approximately 9 times a day, and it’s almost 5 times more often than we use other apps.

First chatbots reviews confirm their advantage in fields like customer service. First of all, chatbot’s interface is personalized, unlike apps UI which is the same for every user. Websites and apps got us used to thinking like a computer. A chatbot is designed to learn how to act like a human. So there you have this significant difference. We can order a new pair of shoes or our uber ride but remember — the long shot is that chatbots will eventually perform tasks we currently waste too much time and money on.

Shopping bots

Retailers noted the growth of online shopping transactions in last 5 years, so moving commerce to messaging platforms seems reasonable and natural. While purchasing products in stationary shops we often use assistance. Online stores sometimes offer much bigger assortment and better deals but we can’t really get any fast and good advisement. Chatbots of online retailers are here to solve this problem.

Chatbot of the huge online retailer — Spring, presented Facebook’s first aspirations to become a western response for Asian giant Wechat. For the first time in history, Messenger allowed online shopping through their chat app and with instant assistance from a chatbot. Spring gathers almost 800 brands and designers. We start purchasing process with a few questions from the bot: about our sex, type of products we are looking for and price range. After this short interview, a user receives boxes-cards with recommended products. Clicking those boxes directs us straight to their online store.

Developers of Spring chatbot spend a lot of time observing customers typical behavior and after few weeks of bots existence, they have already improved their software based on the knowledge they gathered.

For some people online shopping is just not enough, they constantly seek discounts. PennyCat chatbot is a problem solver in this matter. All we have to do is type the name of store/brand we are interested in and in reply we receive information about available discounts or promotional codes.

Utility bots

Chatbots are already displacing apps, even those belonging to really huge brands. Sure chatbot will help you find a perfect place to have lunch at or coffee. Its creator developed it due to the growing discomfort of using too many apps for everything. He combined full database of available places and came up with a bot directing us exactly where we want. Starbucks tried to get us used to their app which is supposed to make ordering coffee easier. But statistics shows that only 16% of customers decide to use it on a daily basis. So it’s clear that better move is to build bot for the platform we already have and use instead of making people use a new one.

Royal Dutch Airlines KLM also notices a potential of moving their actions and customer service to Messenger. When booking our plane ticket we can agree to receive automatic notifications regarding our flight straight through Facebook Messenger. KLM sends information about our booking, time of departure or gives an access to the electronic ticket. Everything takes place within one well-known app.

Another useful chatbot is the amazing InstaLocate. If you’re not interested in using apps like FlightRadar24 you can just message the bot with flight number and see exactly what is the delay, position of the plane and estimated time of arrival.

It’s impossible to leave out brilliant and already popular Hi Poncho, which is the first weather chatbot presented during Facebook’s F8 conference. Poncho’s abilities are constantly growing. Developers team already aggregated first data from users to make improvements to their software. About 3 IT specialists worked over 3 months to create Poncho and the results are truly satisfying. The chatbot is able to hold casual, interesting conversation even on topics other than weather. But its main mission stay accomplished. After giving it our location Poncho sends us back a message with temperature and rainfall or wind information. Then we can set our daily subscription like send me weather forecast every day at 7 am. Poncho is not going to be intrusive due to the smart move of its developers — user with enabled push notifications will receive only the first message every day (regarding awaiting forecast) but the rest of the message will be displayed only if they actually open the chatbox. So if you decide to ignore Poncho and never speak to it again it won’t actually bother you too much.

News bots

Chatbots can also fix your problem with information overload we are currently facing. According to research-live.com, 55% of Internet users visit about 3 news websites in total to avoid this avalanche of content but it’s still not enough to filter information correctly. 44% of respondents browse through news content posted by their friends on Facebook once a week, and 29% — once a day (as a better source of information). We depend on content shared by other people so we don’t have to burst through tons of information ourselves. But with the growth of popularity of social platforms, there is also a growth of information posted on them. Every minute there are 684 478 new posts on Facebook. In this case, we can reach out to our helpful bots and entrust them with the mission to provide us with a daily portion of news every day straight on Messenger.

I highly recommend checking out CNN chatbot. It’s another bot with an option of personal subscription — we can set daily news notifications. Moreover, CNN can provide us more customized content based on our preferences or only send us highlights of each day. We can also browse through news based on keywords.

If you’re an IT fan, you will definitely like TechCrunch’s chatbot. It sends daily articles on our favorite topics and you can even precise what news exactly you’d like to receive.