No, I don’t want to ‘chat’ with your chatbot

As the 2020 presidential race gets underway I thought it best to start gleaning insight into the candidates I am not familiar with, you know, civic duty and all. Started with Marianne Williamson. Naturally, I checked out her social first.

Having built my company Huxly on the messaging platform Messenger, I was stoked to see she was using Messenger to connect with her audience. I eagerly pressed the blue ‘Get Started’ button.

I immediately got a picture of her. Good to know what she looks like. And then this:

I don’t know anything about you yet Marianne and you’re asking me to contribute cash money. Ok.

I don’t want to throw Marianne under the bus. This is not about her politics (as we’ve established, I don’t know anything about them). This is about a missed opportunity. Why go through the effort of creating a chatbot, if you’re not going to chat?

The whole point of this technology is to have a conversation. Not to blast your messaging. So if that is all you’re going to do, then no, I don’t want to ‘chat’ with you.

This is not just the case with presidential hopefuls, Tony Robbins, why you gotta treat us like this too?

As a consumer, I get enough blasts via email. Messenger is not email. So stop talking at me. Use this technology to talk with me.

Why?

Because, if you think about it, talking is the original human interface. Chatting with someone, even online, feels like a direct human connection. As Erika Hall puts it, “the brevity and unpredictability of the messages themselves triggers the release of dopamine that motivates seeking behavior and keeps people coming back for more.”

What that means Tony, is that when you engage with me like a human and I know where you stand on policies, Marianne, I’ll feel more educated and empowered and we’ll begin to build rapport and ultimately a relationship. And when you build a personal relationship with your audience, we become and remain your biggest fans.

I would hope by now you’re nodding along with me, agreeing that messenger technology should be used for conversations, aka a two-way exchange between parties.

A conversation with Tony Robbins or Marianne Williamson would then mean they have the opportunity to not only share their thoughts, but get to know me personally. A conversation would allow them to ask me questions.

As we’ve already established, a one-sided chatbot doesn’t ask questions nor builds personal relationships. Same with pushing out content via email or blog format, it is all very one-dimensional. What’s nice about messengers are their effectiveness for reach and depth. You can make the content in Messenger interactive by asking questions to help your audience process what they are learning. Ask them questions to understand who they are. At Huxly, our clients are seeing a 90% response rate to their questions. They are gathering unique insights they couldn’t before in the least invasive manner: simply asking. No spying or coercion involved.

The key to keeping a solid relationship with your audience starts with understanding them inside and out and the best way to do that is through a conversation. So if you take anything away from this, please don’t offer your audience a chatbot. Please offer them a conversationbot. We can help you do just that at Huxly. Huxly is a publishing platform for brands where we build interactive and immersive educational experiences on Messenger.

At Huxly, we understand the value of building relationships one-on-one to increase your engagement. We created the technology for you to do just that. If you are curious to learn how an impactful Messenger experience can improve your engagement, schedule a time to meet with the Huxly team, hello@huxly.co. We will teach you everything we know.