I recently spoke at the Internet Week Denmark about the paradigm of conversational interfaces and the buzzed-about chatbots. I talked a lot about our responsiveness to the ever evident app fatigue. To be fair, I’m there myself and the aversion I developed towards having 5 apps on my iPhone just for finding a coffee place has influenced the process how we design and build Sure.
1. Nothing to install ⚡️
App fatigue is a major driver for exploring alternative channels for continuous value delivery at Sure. We’ve already seen great effects on onboarding and retention as there’s nothing to download or configure with our chatbot. But I think there’s more to be done around discovery of these new conversational services as we’re escaping the App Store.
I had a brief chat with Phil Libin on this the other day and he was of the opinion that discovery starts when a friend invites the bot into a separate thread or conversation. The power users will then go on to download the native app, like with the example of Operator. I’d still like to think that good chatbots can exist as threads in messaging services like Facebook Messenger or WeChat.
2. UI to retain 💾
We are all already familiar with the conversational UI. We’ve been texting our mums and friends for decades and this is really showing as a big thing with the return of chat-based interfaces. In fact, we send 60 billion messages per day on Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp combined. And since the users don’t have to learn a new UI, it is much simpler to retain and engage them.
3. More social 👪
The language of conversational apps is much more social and less technological. This has also transformed the way we build Sure in our team. We’ve seen different roles evolve as opposed to other tech companies. We spend much more time on copywriting and building the bot’s persona and empathy than designing flows.
4. Leaner 🏃
We’ve started to appreciate this in particular during the crazy week of Facebook’s annual F8 conference when we started receiving over 3,000 messages per day. The speed in which we were able to capture learnings and improve the experience based on real usage was incredible. As opposed to cross-platform app development, we can instantly ship updates to all of our users without any disturbance.
5. Experiment 🔮
Building chatbots costs less and happens much faster than building apps. This in turn allows us to ship our product faster and iterate based on feedback we get. And what I love the most about this experimentation is that we’re focused on value delivery, rather than building potentially useless product features.
Don’t get me wrong, I definitely don’t think everyone should be building chatbots and shifting towards conversational interface. I actually have some strong opinions on that as you can see from my slides but more on that maybe in another post.
Sure is a chatbot that helps you do the right thing. It connects you with ethical, fair, healthy, wholesome businesses and services curated by humans like you. Give it a try here 👌
