Do You Have a Conversational Interface?

Customer interactions with brands will soon become managed by AI via messaging platforms — and companies need to be ready.

Bala Iyer, Andrew Burgert, and Gerald C. Kane Reading Time: 5 min 

Topics

Conversation Conversational Interface Messenger Bot Artificial Intelligence AI Customer Interaction

We live in the age of mobile applications. There are currently several million apps available. This profusion of choices means it can be difficult for users not only to choose which apps to download, but to manage them all — a phenomenon we call “app fatigue.” This situation creates both a need and an opportunity to engage users on a single platform. Today, that platform is increasingly becoming messaging apps.

We think the next era will belong to “the conversational layer” — both text- and voice-driven — that will use chat, messaging, or natural language interfaces to interact with people, brands, services, and bots. This shift is currently evidenced by the massive adoption of messaging apps such as Facebook Messenger, Echo, and WhatsApp, which together host more than 60 billion messages daily. According to eMarketer, messaging apps will reach 2 billion people within a few years. WhatsApp users average nearly 200 minutes each week using the service, and many teenagers now spend more time on smartphones sending instant messages than perusing social networks.

Messaging platforms can also alter the way businesses can communicate with their customers. Currently, conversational interfaces within well-known messaging platforms such as Facebook Messenger, Slack, Skype, WeChat, Kik, and Telegram allow companies to chat with their users.

Bots as Conversation Partners

While mobile chat platforms are interesting, the arrival of artificial intelligence-powered engines called bots have made them a powerful tool for sense-making and commerce. Bots use machine-learning techniques to understand text and provide better responses to user queries. They are present in the background, and they make sense of the conversations taking place and convert them into actions using apps, such as scheduling a meeting or ordering a pizza. For example, imagine you are chatting with your business partner using Messenger and discussing a visit to a client site in Boston. Using machine-learning algorithms, a bot can recognize that you are talking about travel and initiate a transaction with your favorite travel app, such as Expedia, or offer a link for a ride through Uber. The messaging platform effectively becomes a distribution channel for software and services without leaving the conversation.

1-800-Flowers recently launched such an experience on Facebook Messenger and has since expanded to Amazon Alexa and the IBM Watson platforms.

Topics

About the Authors

Bala Iyer is a professor and chair of the Technology, Operations, and Information Management Division at Babson College in Wellesley, Massachusetts. He can be reached on Twitter at @BalaIyer. Andrew Burgert is the CEO of Azumo, a San Francisco-based data and AI development firm. He can be reached on Twitter at @andrewburgert. Gerald C. (Jerry) Kane is an associate professor of information systems at the Carroll School of Management at Boston College and the MIT Sloan Management Review guest editor for the Digital Business Initiative. He can be reached at gerald.kane@bc.edu and on Twitter at @profkane.

Tags:

More Like This

Add a comment

You must to post a comment.

First time here? Sign up for a free account: Comment on articles and get access to many more articles.

Comments (2)
Yinghong Chen
Recently, I got a telephone call the other day from ‘Steven’ who needed some assistance on his recent online shopping.  The shopping site is dealshaker.com. Steven needed a Chinese speaking person to help him find out why his purchased item did not arrive in time. I checked on the site and contacted the seller in Wechat. The seller responded within 10 minutes.  Steven was happy that he solved his communication problem through me,  who performed a function of an intelligent translator. It turns out that the site has many dealers that sell products that requires some conversation after the purchase to decide the delivery, pay the postage, even choose color of the product.  I made sure the purchase was on its way to Steven the next day.
Baskar Ganesan
Great Article......What do you think is that the end of road for Visual interfaces as we move on to Conversational interfaces.