Showing posts with label Chatbots. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Chatbots. Show all posts
Tuesday, 25 February 2020
Thursday, 5 July 2018
Valassis Digital’s chatbot eases the pain of buying a car
Above: Valassis Digital built a chatbot to help customer find cars and car dealers.
Image Credit: Valassis Digital
In the market for a new car? You’re not the only one. Roughly 17.2
million people in the U.S. bought new rides in 2017, according to Autodata,
slightly down from 2016 but coming off a record seven-year sales
streak. That’s despite the fact that, for the most part, the car-buying
experience hasn’t become noticeably easier than it used to be.
Livonia, Michigan-based advertising agency Valassis Digital hopes to shake things up a bit. Today, it launched a Facebook Messenger chatbot designed to help buyers find cars without having to spend hours on a lot.
“We live in an increasingly digital-first world, where consumer convenience reigns supreme,” Mike Balducci, vice president at Valassis, said in a statement. “From auto dealers to grocery stores, brands are constantly innovating to better blend the physical and digital realms and improve the customer experience.
Artificial intelligence, like chatbots, is a prime example of this effort. It provides cost-effective solutions that alleviate brand and consumer pain points, drives brick-and-mortar traffic, and bolsters employee functions.”
You can’t buy cars through the chatbot, and that feature isn’t coming down the pipeline anytime soon. But the bot can show nearby dealerships and their respective inventories, estimate the trade-in value of a car, and set up test drive and service appointments.
In addition, thanks to a partnership with TransUnion, the automotive chatbot can secure a prequalified loan by checking your credit history.
On the backend, dealers get access to a wealth of information about potential customers, including monthly performance reports and email updates with information on bot conversations. They can answer outstanding questions manually if they so choose and see live interactions within Facebook Messenger as they’re taking place.Balducci stresses that dealers only see the information users choose to share. Data is only stored once a user engages with the bot or explicitly grants permission.
So how effective is the bot? Feldman Automotive, which serves about 100,000 people each month with Valassis’ chatbot, said it sees 50 to 60 car purchases tied back to customers’ conversations with it.
“We have piloted the solution with a few dozen dealers thus far and have definitely seen Messenger user engagements that ultimately result in vehicle purchases,” Balducci said via email. “This validates that Messenger is a compelling new channel for dealers to provide consumers with an engaging experience on their path to vehicle purchase. The plan for the future is to continue to develop new channels and user experiences that make it even easier for consumers to engage dealers in their preferred communication channel.”
Source
Livonia, Michigan-based advertising agency Valassis Digital hopes to shake things up a bit. Today, it launched a Facebook Messenger chatbot designed to help buyers find cars without having to spend hours on a lot.
“We live in an increasingly digital-first world, where consumer convenience reigns supreme,” Mike Balducci, vice president at Valassis, said in a statement. “From auto dealers to grocery stores, brands are constantly innovating to better blend the physical and digital realms and improve the customer experience.
Artificial intelligence, like chatbots, is a prime example of this effort. It provides cost-effective solutions that alleviate brand and consumer pain points, drives brick-and-mortar traffic, and bolsters employee functions.”
You can’t buy cars through the chatbot, and that feature isn’t coming down the pipeline anytime soon. But the bot can show nearby dealerships and their respective inventories, estimate the trade-in value of a car, and set up test drive and service appointments.
In addition, thanks to a partnership with TransUnion, the automotive chatbot can secure a prequalified loan by checking your credit history.
On the backend, dealers get access to a wealth of information about potential customers, including monthly performance reports and email updates with information on bot conversations. They can answer outstanding questions manually if they so choose and see live interactions within Facebook Messenger as they’re taking place.Balducci stresses that dealers only see the information users choose to share. Data is only stored once a user engages with the bot or explicitly grants permission.
So how effective is the bot? Feldman Automotive, which serves about 100,000 people each month with Valassis’ chatbot, said it sees 50 to 60 car purchases tied back to customers’ conversations with it.
“We have piloted the solution with a few dozen dealers thus far and have definitely seen Messenger user engagements that ultimately result in vehicle purchases,” Balducci said via email. “This validates that Messenger is a compelling new channel for dealers to provide consumers with an engaging experience on their path to vehicle purchase. The plan for the future is to continue to develop new channels and user experiences that make it even easier for consumers to engage dealers in their preferred communication channel.”
Source
Wednesday, 20 June 2018
How Chatbots Can Improve Customer Experience
At this point, the question is not so much “to chatbot or not to
chatbot” as it is “what will the chatbot do?” and “who will build it?”
and “on what channel, for what purpose?”. As the prevalence of AI
increases in social media spaces, digital marketers from every industry,
regardless of whether they plan to have a chatbot now or in the future,
must eventually answer these questions for their brand. Recently at
Spredfast, we took a dive into bots ourselves.
On May 23, we sponsored an Adweek webinar titled, “Can Chatbots Provide a Great Customer Experience? How Top Brands Automate Social Service Practices.” The webinar, hosted by Adweek’s publishing director Stuart Feil, featured leaders in the chatbot space from Booking.com, General Motors, and Spredfast—these experts shared what they’re doing to automate their social customer service and customer care. We’ve rounded up three salient takeaways regarding what you need to know about chatbots today.
Kevin Morris, SVP of Product at Spredfast, shared his thoughts on the current state of chatbots. The AI environment is still pretty murky, Morris explained, but things are starting to come into focus. We have a better understanding of the realities of AI and chatbots than we did even last year, he said. As early as last year, digital marketers were wondering whether or not we were on the verge of customer care becoming completely automated, and whether or not that prospect was a good one. But it’s clear now, Morris said, that chatbots and humans will interact together for bot cost deflection—and to create great customer experiences. Here’s where we are today regarding AI capabilities for social customer care:
Today, marketers must ask where we want to plug in these new automated capabilities to existing workflows, and, importantly, where humans will still come into the equation. Ongoing human interaction is still a focus as chatbots today mainly perform three tasks: resolving the simple, assisting the agent, and inspiring the customer. Here’s what each of these tasks looks like:
Now that we have a better idea of what chatbots can do, we can ask the question of whether a chatbot makes sense for your business, Buckner explained. There’s a lot of opportunity in chatbots for your partners as well as for your customers, he added:
Essentially, Buckner said, whenever time is cut for your business or your partner, you have value from your bot. Chatbots can help you build your brand by aiding with visibility and scaling—they can get positive interactions to more customers. But chatbots cannot improve an already poor customer interaction, Buckner noted. They can only further and improve what the humans are already doing well, so be sure you have a solid customer care plan in place before launching a bot.
Buckner seconded Harris’s perspective. He said that even when customers aren’t explicitly demanding a chatbot, one could still help your customer care experience. If people are expecting outcomes from social channels, chatbots could help. For example, if people are Tweeting your brand asking repeated simple requests, like questions about deals, that’s a good sign that a chatbot could aid your care efforts, Buckner continued.
Source Jaime Netzer
On May 23, we sponsored an Adweek webinar titled, “Can Chatbots Provide a Great Customer Experience? How Top Brands Automate Social Service Practices.” The webinar, hosted by Adweek’s publishing director Stuart Feil, featured leaders in the chatbot space from Booking.com, General Motors, and Spredfast—these experts shared what they’re doing to automate their social customer service and customer care. We’ve rounded up three salient takeaways regarding what you need to know about chatbots today.
How to Understand the Current State of Chatbots
Kevin Morris, SVP of Product at Spredfast, shared his thoughts on the current state of chatbots. The AI environment is still pretty murky, Morris explained, but things are starting to come into focus. We have a better understanding of the realities of AI and chatbots than we did even last year, he said. As early as last year, digital marketers were wondering whether or not we were on the verge of customer care becoming completely automated, and whether or not that prospect was a good one. But it’s clear now, Morris said, that chatbots and humans will interact together for bot cost deflection—and to create great customer experiences. Here’s where we are today regarding AI capabilities for social customer care:
Today, marketers must ask where we want to plug in these new automated capabilities to existing workflows, and, importantly, where humans will still come into the equation. Ongoing human interaction is still a focus as chatbots today mainly perform three tasks: resolving the simple, assisting the agent, and inspiring the customer. Here’s what each of these tasks looks like:
- Resolving the simple: Chatbots can automate FAQs to free up agents to answer questions that are more subjective.
- Assisting the agent: Chatbots can also make agents more effective as they answer customer questions by capturing required data (email, phone number, order number, etc). Agent-facing chatbots can make interactions more effective by recommending content to agents (suggested responses based on context, suggested offers, and more), and they can resolve simple tasks, like this example:
- Inspiring the customer: Finally, chatbots can create unique customer experiences (one-off marketing promotions, making recommendations, and more) that inspire brand interaction.
How to Tell If Your Brand Needs a Chatbot
Brennen Buckner, a Lead Product Manager on Booking.com (a leading travel site) heads up the team that’s building the brain behind Booking.com’s Facebook chatbot, as well as all of the site’s conversational interfaces.Now that we have a better idea of what chatbots can do, we can ask the question of whether a chatbot makes sense for your business, Buckner explained. There’s a lot of opportunity in chatbots for your partners as well as for your customers, he added:
Essentially, Buckner said, whenever time is cut for your business or your partner, you have value from your bot. Chatbots can help you build your brand by aiding with visibility and scaling—they can get positive interactions to more customers. But chatbots cannot improve an already poor customer interaction, Buckner noted. They can only further and improve what the humans are already doing well, so be sure you have a solid customer care plan in place before launching a bot.
How to Tell if Your Customer Wants a Chatbot
Rebecca Harris is the Global Head, Social Center of Expertise at General Motors, a group she helped implement several years ago. Harris shared GM’s perspective on whether or not customers want chatbots. She explained that GM now has two out of three customers requesting that their issues be resolved on social, which is essentially a request for a chatbot, even if the customer doesn’t realize it. In fact, Harris said, the majority of their customers really want all of their problems to be solved via Twitter. Though GM isn’t ready for that reality quite yet, chatbots are helping them to meet customer demand for resolution of issues via social.Buckner seconded Harris’s perspective. He said that even when customers aren’t explicitly demanding a chatbot, one could still help your customer care experience. If people are expecting outcomes from social channels, chatbots could help. For example, if people are Tweeting your brand asking repeated simple requests, like questions about deals, that’s a good sign that a chatbot could aid your care efforts, Buckner continued.
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