Who’s Got Your Wallet? Trusting Bots in eCommerce
Messaging online continues to grow in popularity. In fact, the use of messaging apps has downright exploded over the past few years. According to recent surveys, use of these apps has surpassed social apps when it comes to monthly active users. This popularity has businesses taking notice. While most don’t have the resources to leverage these for 1x1 human interactions, they have been finding ways to use automation and technology to create a more responsive interactive environment.
Major companies are embracing this, especially for eCommerce. Staples uses Facebook messenger to assist in product suggestions and to enable their customers to complete their orders right inline from the messaging dialogue. Companies like Sephora are using the bot platform Kiki to help personalize suggestions and offer makeup tips after they interact with a consumer. H&M uses the same platform to inquire about preferences and to create a fashion profile complete with wardrobe suggestions. For other companies, such as KLM, chatbots are being used for millions of interactions on a regular basis.
At the same time, bots are starting to be spoofed. Hackers are using them to steal information, with bot identity rapidly becoming an issue. As an example, bot-enabled advertising fraud is estimated to cost companies over $16B per year.
Complicating the matter is that the line is blurring between what is bot-enabled and what is human. 27% of people couldn’t tell they were talking to a chatbot. As humans interact with more bots, or bots interact with each other, they need to quickly establish trust, much in the same way people get today in everything from secure website transactions to the apps they download on their phone.
End users would never interact with a person or site whose identity is in doubt. This need for identity verification and audit carries over to bots in eCommerce, and when solutions like BotChain are implemented, they serve to increases end user confidence in the uses cases and interactions that they may leverage a bot for.
