How do conversational assistants interfere in the customer relationship?
Am I speaking to a robot?!
What could have surprised, or even offended, at one time has now become commonplace… Chatbots have become the essential partners of brands to help consumers order a product, solve a problem, or simply provide information; available 7 days a week – 24 hours a day. Let’s see how – and how far – robots have infiltrated our customer journeys…
From Eliza to conversational assistants
While they are now capable of simulating a conversation using natural language, chatbots have an ancestor, less efficient, certainly, but of a very respectable age! Eliza, the first conversational assistant, was indeed invented in 1966 in the United States by a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). It merely reformulated what it heard.
A little more talkative, virtual agents then appeared on websites in the form of avatars. They were responsible for filling out non-personalized contact forms or providing very simple information.
Arriving in the era of artificial intelligence, chatbots are now truly revolutionizing the customer relationship: they are indeed becoming capable of improving over the course of their interactions, thanks to the functionalities of "machine learnings".
And having a conversational assistant is now within everyone's reach with, for example, the Messenger platform, Facebook's platform that allows developers to create their own assistant!
According to the newspaper Le Monde Informatique, the chatbot market is expected to represent 994 million dollars by 2024.
But what do they really bring?
A personalized customer relationship… A key element of an optimized customer journey, in these times of hyper consumption and hyper connectivity, personalizing the customer relationship is a way for brands to stand out. Conversational agents offer this opportunity! They can, for example, remember your habits or preferences, and thus propose the most suitable services and products for your requests. They understand and anticipate your expectations!
They are the bearers of a brand's universe… Beyond simply providing information, chatbots help create and develop brand universes to unite the communities they target.
Thus, conversational agents will be configured to adopt specific lexical fields: humor, a friendly tone, technical language… Nothing is left to chance; the chatbot is truly stage-managed. It becomes a key part of the brand it represents and is a bearer of its values and identity.
Sustainably enhance your customer relationship with ViaSpeech!
This desire to place conversational AI at the service of customer relations has been manifested at ViaDialog through the development of ViaSpeech.
ViaSpeech offers a complete solution for automating the customer journey in natural language through assistants that can be integrated into your voice servers.
For more information, our teams are at your disposal to advise you!
Last updated: December 9, 2021
