Chatbots: adding the human touch

Contributed by Matt Churchill, Flipside Group

The rise in the use of chatbots as a way for brands to communicate with their existing and potential new customers presents a paradox for community managers.

The evolution of social media, born out of the churn of mid 90s chatrooms, into one-to-one brand to consumer interaction via mobile platforms, induced marketers to prescribe to the drug of ‘authentic engagement’.

It led in the late 2000’s to brands ‘becoming human’ and creating mountains of content designed to convince consumers that a Big Global Brand could be their friend. The novelty of being able to tweet Big Global Brand, and get an answer within moments, has enhanced consumer expectations to the point where an instant response to the most inane of questions is demanded.

Community managers were given the responsibility of fulfilling a utility: read a query and respond with a preset protocol driven response: “choose A or B, be on your way good Netizen”.

The rise of the chatbot means that brands can provide a function, in more or less real time, to push customers to their online destination as quickly as possible.

Chatbots are taking on the community manager mantle: receive a data input and reply with a binary answer: “choose A or B, be on your way good Netizen”.

The job is the same, the conduit has changed.

Checking a Facebook page on the weekend to answer a question relating to a sell by date is commonplace, and has been for a decade now. Bots are coming to support that role and help community managers help their communities with ever greater efficiency.

The community manager’s job has evolved to juggling knowledge, customer relations, content creation and creating timely content. Something has to give and that presents an opportunity to automate tasks within the CM skillset.

AI and chatbots are a move forward towards automation, supporting the human artist with a binary scientist.

But, without that human touch, the nuance of vocabulary picked up through hours of scything through community comment, chatbots are worthless.

If a customer feels that they are interacting with a bot, they will switch off. There is a craft in creating copy to help a consumer get from A to B quickly. That is intensified when you are letting a machine do your bidding.

Community managers need to write responses for chatbots that seem real, without faking themselves out of existence and it is this human touch that is making AI a plausible way of supporting people.