Thursday, August 31, 2017

how chatbots can help to streamline education



It’s an exciting time for innovations in ed tech, and chatbots are at the forefront. Mobile apps are still compelling and there are many use cases where an app can provide the richest experience. However, the downside is that you still need to download them, log in, keep them updated, and make sure they work well with your devices. When it comes to sheer speed and convenience, nothing can beat a chatbot.

So, what is a chatbot, anyway? In brief, it’s just software that allows for a conversational or messaging style interface that simulates a human interaction.

Most people use lots of messaging software for communicating with friends and colleagues already, such as SMS (texting), WeChat, SnapChat, WhatsApp, Kik, Telegram, Slack, and more. Chatbots allow us to use some of these messaging platforms for lots of tasks beyond just talking to a friend. For instance, now you can book a doctor’s appointment, shop for some jeans, call an Uber, or order a pizza using chatbots rather than logging into an app. Some chatbots have artificial intelligence and machine learning behind them, and others have a database of information and automated responses. Either way, chatbots allow you to get basic tasks done quickly and easily with a simple series of messages or commands. 


"Deploy a mobile ready messaging strategy across your organization"

Deploy a mobile ready messaging strategy across your organization



Several recent events are encouraging a proliferation of chatbots. For instance, Facebook Messenger just opened its platform to allow developers to create bots. Slack users also have access to a marketplace of bots, such as Kip, a bot that lets you order office supplies right from your conversation channel with your co-workers. We’ll soon be seeing bots springing up in all different industries.

How can chatbots be useful in higher ed? In one example, AdmitHub created a chatbot to help new students navigate the college transition process; Georgia State students can now apply for student aid, register for classes, and apply for housing, all using a simple chat interface. In a recent Business Insider article, Bill Gates suggests that chatbots can be used as a tutoring resource for students. Cornell is using the CourseQ chatbot for event logistics at homecoming this fall, as well as for polling in the classroom.

This recent article by John Brandon shows how chatbots could be used to help parents manage the process of moving their kids into the college dorms. There are numerous other campus chatbot possibilities, including alumni relations, classroom engagement, student reminders, and more.

Some are concerned that chatbots will replace the meaningful human interactions that are such a critical part of the higher ed experience. However, one could also argue the opposite. Chatbots allow for the automation of certain types of routine, repetitive, time-consuming communication while freeing up more time for deeper philosophical discussions and interactions between professors and students. Should professors be wasting time answering questions such as “When is the paper due?” or “When are your office hours?” Instead they could be addressing larger questions about the meaning of time and space and about the analysis of the material they reviewed in class. IBM’s Watson is being used to power a Teaching Assistant bot that’s designed to do just that: answer routine questions while freeing up time for human professors and assistants to address the more meaningful issues. “Jill Watson,” as the AI is called, is doing this so effectively that some students don’t even realize that she isn’t human.

It should be noted that we are early in the bot revolution, and many AI solutions actually leverage human power while they’re building out their technology. Rather than being fully automated, some bots have humans responding or editing content as an interim step. In other words, the bots feature humans pretending to be machines that are pretending to be humans. Yes, we are living in wild times!

The bottom line is that students love messaging platforms and spend a lot of time on them already. Chatbots will allow higher ed administrators and professors to engage with students in a medium that’s ubiquitous, familiar, and comfortable for everyone to use. Many learning management tools are not keeping pace with the innovation in the tech industry, and students complain that the information they need is difficult to access in these outdated systems. In a world focused on convenience and ease, chatbots offer a welcome efficiency and productivity tool for students, parents, and faculty alike.

Source

Wednesday, August 30, 2017

why customers need real-time mobile communication


"Deploy a mobile ready messaging strategy across your organization"

Deploy a mobile ready messaging strategy across your organization


As consumers have come to expect instant connectivity at the click of a button, it’s no surprise that more than 6 billion SMS messages are sent each day.

And while text messages have traditionally served as a means of communication between individuals, businesses have also begun incorporating various types of messaging capabilities into their sales strategies in order to meet consumers’ changing preferences for interaction.

Marketers recognize that today’s consumer path to purchase, particularly for high-consideration products and services, isn’t linear, winding through digital, traditional, and mobile touchpoints. And messaging, whether via chatbot or a text message, can be leveraged as a way to bridge that gap and close new business.

But with this new mode of communication comes new complexities and questions: What is the ideal role of messaging in a sales conversation? When does it improve the chances of sales, and in what instances can it actually help answer customers’ questions?

What actually happens when consumers text companies?

Our data shows that offering consumers the option to text (when they already have the option of email or phone) generally increases consumer engagement, but can also cause confusion, as consumers may not have much prior experience with messaging businesses. So let’s start with a few situations where messaging is helpful to the purchase process.

At its best, messaging helps consumers answer basic questions while giving a business insight into a consumer’s intent. Take online promotions, for example. A cable company might run a campaign that offers local students discounted television and internet services. If a student comes across a mobile advertisement promoting the discount, they may wonder, Does this apply to me? Rather than take the time to call the cable company and speak with an agent, some students would prefer to text the company as a first step, to confirm their eligibility before taking the next steps. For binary questions like this, automated messaging or chatbots are especially promising.

At this point, a salesperson can guide the consumer down the best path to purchase. It also entices consumers to take the next step, which is often a phone call, as the conversation becomes too cumbersome or complex for messaging. In our trials, more than 20 percent of texts to businesses lead to phone calls or in-person conversations. What’s more, these phone calls are shorter, as most of the initial questions have already been answered, and convert at more than double the rate of a typical call. In these instances, messaging helps to move these qualified customers down the sales funnel, boosting revenue for businesses.

Where messaging falls short

Still, there are some situations in which messaging can do more harm than good. Our analysis shows that messaging is not suitable for complex purchases or inquiries, which constitute half of all communications between consumers and businesses.

Take our student looking for cable packages. While the student was able to determine if they were eligible for the cable promotion using messaging, they may ask one of 100 different types of questions before making a decision about what package they actually should purchase. This is where messaging falls short. Any one of these questions has an exponential number of potential follow-up questions, which an automated response cannot easily satisfy.

If businesses attempt to remedy complex questions with messaging, they run the risk of annoying customers and losing potential sales as a result when their messages are misunderstood. The same desire for instant gratification that has given way to the rise in messaging also results in frustration when their needs aren’t easily met.

For instance, it’s common for consumers texting businesses to say “Are you there?” because of long wait times or bad cell phone service, and because they aren’t sure if the conversation is live. It’s also common for someone to text “I don’t understand.” It’s at that moment human intervention is required to rescue the potential purchase. So where do companies net out with messaging?

It’s clear that consumers today demand easy access to information, and businesses that ignore that desire will be passed up for their competitors that do offer services like messaging. There is promise for messaging and automation early in the sales process, to help establish initial intent and encourage conversions. But a company’s best bet will be to balance automated, text-based, and voice-based interactions appropriately to maximize sales from the mobile consumer.

Source

how to use mobile marketing for a B2B lead generation campaign



Consumer preference for accessing content through mobile devices is now almost universal. Business buyers are not far behind, using their devices to research their needs and identify further sources of information, potential vendors, and service providers.

In fact, B2B mobile usage is intensifying throughout the entire buying cycle. According to a Google and Millward Brown Digital study of 3,000 B2B decision-makers about their research and purchase habits:

  • 42% of researchers use a mobile device during their purchasing process.
  • Search activity for those using a smartphone has intensified.
  • B2B researchers aren't just using mobile devices when they are out of the office; 49% of those who use their mobile devices for research—comparing prices, reading about products, comparing feature sets—do so while at work.

Companies can respond to these opportunities by infusing "mobile experiences" that span marketing, customer service, e-commerce, and IT functions so that the customer experience is fluid, yet consistent.

Here are four ways B2B companies can use mobile along the customer journey.


1. Build immediacy in customer engagement with SMS texts:

SMS offers B2B marketers unparalleled reach, a simple method of engagement, and the ability to deliver information with a sense of immediacy.

Although SMS is powerful in its own right, it is also a highly effective complement to other digital marketing tactics. Employing SMS is the easiest initial method for customers and prospects to connect to your brand, and as a way to opt in to your use of their mobile phone number.

Offer a service where your business clients can sign up for text-based ordering reminders. For instance, if a company orders your product or service every quarter, send a "time to reorder?" message a few days before the normal ordering date. If you make your customers' jobs easier and less stressful, they'll consider your company for future purchasing decisions.

Identify specific opportunities to engage customers and prospects via SMS. Focus on useful pieces of information that you can deliver at their moment of peak value. Build engagement scenarios that ramp up in intensity from SMS to mobile Web to, if applicable, native mobile applications, and even your pre-sales or sales teams.


2. Extend the value of live events:

B2B buyers expect fluidity between digital and physical experiences. Digitize content to shift live events from point-in-time activities to the centerpieces of ongoing customer interactions. A 2017 B2B Content Marketing Trends report showed that in-person events are in the top four marketing tactics.

Mobile devices, proximity sensors, and badge scanners help marketers learn more about target buyers and engage current customers by helping attendees network, solve problems, and meet experts. Mobile easily allows users to become part of the action by responding to surveys, sharing photos and comments socially, and giving real-time feedback. Moreover, B2B marketers can extend the event impact with digital content and experiences for ongoing engagement with prospects and customers.


3. Enhance customer service and care:

Mobile is pivotal in customer care not only because of increased consumer usage and satisfaction with this touchpoint but also because of productivity gains. Today, virtually all customer service offers some mobile customer service capabilities.

A recent study found that a whopping $62 billion is lost through poor customer service in the US.

Customers will demand greater ability and flexibility to interact with customer service organizations via mobile devices—for example, reading an FAQ while speaking with a customer service agent.

Customers can send SMS messages to company landlines and connect with a live agent who can answer questions in real-time via text. One great innovation in customer service software is the ability to record and share screens and videos. It enables customers to record the issue they are having either on their screen (for software issues) or using their webcam (for hardware/product issues) so the customer service agent knows exactly what is happening. As a response, the agent can record the solution, or the steps to take to resolve the issue, and share it with the customer to provide clear instructions.

Create troubleshooting videos for common problems and make them available for free on iTunes and the Android market. Direct customers to these videos and ask for feedback on how effective they were in solving the issue. That feedback will become another valuable connection to your customer and improve your company's own resources.

Mobile is not only a channel for customer service but also an overarching aspect of the customer experience. Each interaction should convey consistent and personalized data, contextual knowledge, and information to the customer.

4. Support the sales force:

B2B marketers often find themselves tasked with creating tools for Sales to use in the field. Mobile devices present an opportunity to create dynamic, timely collateral that goes beyond standard case studies and leave-behinds.

For example, a medical technology company loaded short videos of its best customer references and product demos and provided them to their sales reps on mobile devices. B2B marketers can also push out sales-enablement assets, such as pricing announcements, selling tips and quotas, buyer personas, competitive profiles, and the like.

The upshot: embracing mobile enables B2B marketers to carry the conversation to clients wherever they are. Customers want control over real-time, location-enabled interactions—which further heightens expectations for relevant real-time offers. B2B marketers need to shift their analytics systems and their traditional campaigns—which run over fixed time periods—to more flexible systems that can operate in customer time. Mobile makes that happen.

Source

Tuesday, August 29, 2017

how sms is the most versatile channel for companies to communicate with customers



When it comes to mobile marketing, there is a lot of room for growth among  businesses, according to a new report from Textlocal.

The report, based on a poll of 1,000 users, says Britain has roughly 80 million active mobile users, but just 50 per cent of businesses are using SMS for marketing.

However, that is about to change. SMS-based mobile marketing is expected to rise, from 37.2 million customers this year, to 48.7 million before we reach 2020. 

"Dynamically Send, Receive & Enhance Text Message Campaigns."

Dynamically Send, Receive & Enhance Text Message Campaigns.



If this trend continues, SMS marketing is set to become the fastest growing marketing channel.

Ofcom’s numbers are saying that 93 percent of the  population has a mobile phone, and the majority has it on them for more than 16 hours a day.

The study also points just how potent this channel can be - -98 percent of branded, or business-related SMS messages are opened, and 90 per cent get read within the first three minutes.

Textlocal managing director Jason Palgrave-Jones said: “By their very nature, mobile phones are to hand and provide an unrivalled platform for brands to communicate directly with their audiences. These are exciting times for those involved in the mobile industry as the benefits to businesses and consumers are realised.”

Direct Marketing Association managing director of the medium Rachel Aldighieri added: “The medium [SMS] is already widely used for sending marketing messages, however as technologies grow we expect to see an exponential rise in its use amongst businesses and consumers.”

Source

Monday, August 28, 2017

how enterprise chatbots is changing customer care services by artificial intelligence


"e enterprises and customers in real time conversations"

Engage enterprises and customers in real time conversations


Customer support services have changed. Before, you'd have a team of people in an office with headsets and computers, answering call after call, and email after email. While this is still the case in many organizations, the way we communicate with our customers has changed and as a result, so has the technology we use.

Today, consumers have switched towards messaging applications as their preferred method of personal and professional communications. They interact with brands the same way they would with their family and friends. With that in mind, companies are following their audiences where they're most likely to be.

Unfortunately, finding the resources to interact with millions of potential consumers on a daily basis is near impossible, so we've started using robots. These robots are powered by artificial intelligence (AI), allowing them to interact with our consumers in the same way a human would. They're called chatbots.

The Benefits of Integrating an AI-Powered Chatbot Into Your Customer Care Services

As AI technology continues to grow, it's essential that your company includes it in its business processes, and what better place to start than in your customer care department? After all, this is where your company has some of the most important and enlightening conversations with your customers.

What makes having an AI-powered chatbot so great that companies of all sizes, from various industries, are using them to have some of their most important interactions with their audiences?

Instant Service

While technological advancements and the proliferation of the internet has given us numerous advantageous business solutions, it has also equipped consumers with the notion that they can receive the information they want, instantaneously. They've become increasingly impatient, leaving customer support teams under a mound of pressure.

Huge enterprises can't offer instantaneous support to their customer unless they hire millions of agents. AI-powered enterprise chatbot solutions allow you to create a chatbot that can take on all your more basic customer problems while cutting out the long waiting times.

Self-Service

It's not just about offering instant responses to your customers' queries. Enterprise chatbot solutions empower them to get answers without being put on hold or having to wait for an email response by creating a self-service system in their favorite messaging applications. Aside from empowering them, you'll only be making a one-time monetary investment, allowing you to cut costs and increase productivity.

Broader Reach

One of the biggest advantages of using enterprise chatbot solutions with AI in your customer support strategy is that you'll be available to your audience 24/7, on a global scale. Even if every one of your offices is closed, your customers will still be able to contact you with an emergency whether they're at home on a computer or using their mobile devices on the go.

Increased Sales

While your AI enterprise customer care chatbot will be predominantly used to interact with consumers and resolve any problems they may be facing, it can also become an integral part of your marketing and sales teams. With the right training, it will be able to send personalized offers to your customers on demand, as well as take orders, and process payments, among other activities.

Data Analysis

As mentioned above, your customer support team has some of the most important and enlightening conversations with your customers, but gathering and analyzing that amount of varied data is virtually impossible. Fortunately for us, AI-powered chatbots gather that data for us.

While many current enterprise chatbot solutions offer limited analytics, they do offer you the reports you need to analyze your conversations yourself. Metrics you can track include:

  • Total number of users reached
  • Average session duration
  • Sessions per user
  • Interactions per user
  • Click-through rates
  • Active and engaged users
  • Confusion triggers
  • Response time
  • Conversation steps
  • Retention rates

Creating Your Own AI Customer Care Chatbot

The real question is: how easy is it for large enterprises to include AI-powered chatbots into their processes? Lucky for us, gone are the days where coding and web development skills were required. Now, you can use an enterprise chatbot solution to simply creating an account and linking it to your social media profiles.

By using complex machine learning technologies, chatbot solutions can help you deploy an AI-powered chatbot into your customer care services in a matter of minutes. Your chatbot should be able to:

  • Integrate with all the major payment systems
  • Become an integral part of your marketing and sales team
  • Use AI and natural language processing (NLP) to answer all your customer questions

Finally…

Enterprise chatbot solutions with AI are essentially super-intelligent customer service assistants. Despite these chatbots needing a human eye monitoring them ensure everything runs smoothly, they do offer large enterprises the chance to tend to a broader customer base while cutting costs and increasing productivity.

Source

how sms is essential as a pull marketing tactic



SMS marketing has been around since the 90s. Until recently, it was viewed as a bit of a niche tool. Now that businesses have realized how powerful it is, SMS marketing has experienced a surge in popularity. The simple fact is that the modern marketplace is changing, and Text has become one of the best ways to reach out to your customers. When executed correctly, SMS marketing is more powerful than any other method of digital outreach.


http://www.vectramind.com/sms.html

Dynamically Send, Receive & Enhance Text Message Campaigns.

 
1) SMS is Mobile

These days, mobile content is king. Traffic from phones and tablets now exceeds that from desktop sources. While PPC marketing, SEO, and web design scramble to catch up to the rapid changes in how we access information, sending and receiving text messages is a reflex that is natural to most consumers. There is no special training or explanation necessary, your audience will know exactly what to do with your message.


2) SMS is Read

Take a look at the stats of your mailing list. Even with a list of engaged readers, you’ll be lucky to hit a 30% open rate. SMS marketing, on the other hand, has an open rate of 90% within 3 minutes of sending the message. Most consumers have their mobile phone on them at all times, and receive notifications whenever a text message is delivered. Plus, SMS is a somewhat uncommon promotional method, so user’s inboxes aren’t flooded with promotional material. For the time being, SMS marketing is the most effective digital marketing technique you can employ.

3) SMS is Reliable


With an email campaign, you’re constantly fighting against spam filters. Even if you have a list of engaged, double-opt-in leads, a portion of your messages are going to miss the inbox. You never truly known how effective a campaign is going to be, making it hard to justify investing in an email list. But SMS is incredibly reliable. Users can opt-in and out instantly. This means that when you send out an SMS campaign, you’ll have 100% certainty that every subscriber on your list will receive your message.


4) SMS is Trackable

Is that SMS marketing is an untraceable channel. Sure, you might not get the level of detail you have with Google Analytics, but most of that data would be irrelevant for SMS. You have the ability to track all of the meaningful metrics of your campaign. You can see, in real time, how many messages have been delivered and how many have been read. You are also able to track customer engagement through responses and conversions. In fact, it’s even possible for you to create targeted campaigns that will allow you to gain a further understanding of your mobile database.

5) SMS is Engaging


Consumers are more willing to engage with businesses through text than through any other medium. According to the Mobile Marketing Association, consumers are five times more likely to respond to a text message than an email. For them, SMS is easy. Responding to a message just takes a few quick taps. Compared with other marketing strategies such as interstitials and pop up advertising, SMS marketing harbors positive feelings with clients instead of frustration.

Source

how push notifications helps users with timely and relevant content



In some ways this is understandable. As consumers we’re all familiar with push (all too familiar in some cases). And as marketers we love anything that feels like activity, and you can’t get much more active than firing out messages at random to millions of users! But the truth is that push is only a small piece of the mobile marketing puzzle.

Why is that? Well, for two core reasons are mentioned below:

  • The ability to send push is many orders of magnitude less significant than how sophisticated your push campaigns are
  • There are a number of other native mobile marketing tools available, all of which are often significantly more effective than push in achieving our objectives

Ultimately it all boils down to this. But as promised, let’s look at each of these in turn. Then we’ll join them up in the end.




"Increase engagement with your APP users and drive conversions with Push Notifications."

Increase engagement with your APP users and drive conversions


Why Ability To Send Push Is About 10% Of The Story
 
There’s no need to beat around the bush. In the year 2017, the simple ability to send a push notification is about as valuable as having a large collection of carrier pigeons. As with any communications channel, all the value is in how you use it. So when any organization or vendor claims to have push notifications covered, it’s worth checking exactly what they mean by that.

Push sent without intelligence is little more than mobile spam. Again, as consumers most of us know this. But what do we mean by intelligence? Here’s just a few examples of what I am talking about:

  • Proper, dynamic targeting. Not “people who have not been in the app for 7 days”. Try something like “people who left an item in the shopping cart, either on mobile or desktop, between 4 and 28 hours ago, who based on previous history are most likely to open the app at this time, and who have previously purchased via the app”. And that’s a single example. Targeting is everything.
  • Thoughtful personalization. It’s relatively straightforward to add in a name. But smarter personalization involves the majority of the content of a push message being relevant solely to that individual. In the example above – what item was left in the shopping cart? You have the data – name it!
  • Tested content. As we noted above, it’s easy to send push notifications, but how do you know what you are sending is effective? For that matter, how do you know what you send is not actively irritating and leading to app uninstalls? Push without clear measurement is meaningless, and in an ideal world you’ll be testing content on a regular basis to ensure you’re delivering the best possible performance from your campaigns.

If there’s one key lesson here it’s that any communication channel is only as good as the data and the thought behind it. And in the modern digital marketing era, that means a whole lot of work gathering, processing and making sense of data – ideally in real-time.

Lastly, like any other channel, push alone isn’t particularly effective. It works best in conjunction with other communication channels. Some of those are outside the native mobile environment, but not all are. And that brings us to our next topic – the fact that push is only part of the puzzle.

Beyond Just Push – The World Of Native Mobile Marketing

 
There’s one blindingly obvious limitation when it comes to push marketing. It can only be sent when the user is not in the app. As such, whilst it might do some sort of a job when it comes to simple messages that bring people back to the app, it fails in terms of delivering a rich marketing message at precisely the time when users are most likely to be responsive – when you already have their attention.

To do that, you’ll need to some of those other native mobile marketing techniques that we mentioned above, and two in particular.

The first of these are in-app campaigns. These are simply dynamic content and screens, delivered using the same intelligence we talked about above, to users who are already in the app. Think splash screens promoting sale items or personalized offers for users – although that is only the tip of the iceberg.

These campaigns typically have response rates up above 50% – compared to somewhere between 1% and 5% for push campaigns. And that’s no surprise, because when they are well targeted and triggered at the right time, they are giving the user just what they need when they need it. Now is not the time to go into great detail about all the ways in which these campaigns can drive the numbers in your mobile business, but a brief read through this blog post will certainly put you in the picture.

The second is the editing of the app UX itself. To some, this might not sound like marketing, but to those people we would point out that ‘Product’ has always been one of the 4 Ps of marketing, and changing or personalizing user experience is a very direct and effective way of moving mobile metrics. We’ve had customers increase engagement rates by 50% through simple UX changes relating to navigation.

These techniques are both direct and effective. And they work best when used together, and alongside (not instead of) push notifications. Smart, integrated marketing campaigns of this type are a million miles away from the borderline-spam approach of push alone.

And Beyond Native Mobile Marketing…
 
Finally (and mercifully briefly), it’s worth noting that we have not yet even touched on the world beyond native mobile. But of course, for the consumer, there is not necessarily a clear distinction between the mobile app, the desktop website, or indeed even the bricks-and mortar store.

Standalone push is ignorant of this outside world, whereas an integrated mobile marketing platform most certainly is.

That matters – for two very simple reasons:

  • Native mobile data in terms of behavior in the app and response to native mobile campaigns can inform campaigns in other channels. Some of those, such as web push and email, are relatively adjacent and tools that most digital marketers will want in their armory.
  • The campaigns you deliver on native mobile (including push) can be informed by data from outside that space. So for example, a push campaign or an in-app message can be shown to users who have browsed a particular item on desktop internet.

Unless push is linked – ideally in real-time – with the wider marketing infrastructure, it simply isn’t possible to provide this kind of 360° experience. Another reason why mobile marketing is about so much more than push notifications!

Source

Sunday, August 27, 2017

how chatbots will be amazing at upgrading the viability and benefit of your specialists.



While technology replacing humans continues to be a point of anxiety for some, bots are intended to make humans more effective and valuable not less

Recently, Facebook declared the next digital frontier would centre on artifical intelligence (AI)-powered chatbots and their inevitable rise, driven in no small part by the company’s own expansion into the bot space via its Messenger platform.

The news elicited no shortage of attention from the media and for good reason. Certainly, chatbots deliver a ton of genuinely innovative functionality, and they reflect our increasing preference for self-service customer service.

Forrester reports that 70% of customers prefer sourcing information from a company website rather than using phone or email. Meanwhile, on the business side, live-agent calls average anywhere from $5-9 per call, and an interactive voice response (IVR) or interactive text response (ITR) interaction can be as cheap as 20p.

But do bots really represent the next big thing in AI-powered self-service? Will they replace apps? Could they act as a replacement for customer service agents? Or are they simply a passing Silicon Valley fad? Most likely, the truth lies somewhere in the middle, but it is certainly no fad.

First, it’s worth exploring the origins of chatbots and why they seem to have piqued the industry’s interest recently. After all, the technologies at the core of Facebook’s bots, as well as others, aren’t particularly new – they’ve been on smartphones for years. And while it’s true these technologies are getting better, that fact alone doesn’t justify the limelight AI-powered chatbots currently enjoy.

Instead, Facebook’s push into chatbots has a lot more to do with getting users to interact with Messenger in new ways and, critically, for longer periods of time.

Similar to messaging apps like WeChat, Facebook is exploring new functionality unrelated to messaging, which includes features like QR scanning, mobile payments and, yes, bots.

In situations where a customer would be interacting with a human operator via a live chat prompt, a bot can skillfully handle much of that workload at a fraction of the cost and likely with greater speed and accuracy.

However, that still has not eliminated the need for the human touch in the customer journey at certain points.

Customer service bots like the ones Facebook is currently hyping have been available on some messaging platforms like WeChat for some time but they’ve made minimal headway in the space. Purely based on the technology, that might seem surprising but the truth comes down to the way customers want to be served information.

The best customer experience involves one continuous, seamless journey, where the conversation is contextualised and can take place across all voice and digital channels.

The limitations in something like a chatbot in Facebook’s Messenger platform challenge the natural tendencies of how humans operate – at least in the current time.

Another point of conversation is around the potential for bots to replace humans as customer service agents. But while technology replacing humans continues to be a point of anxiety for some, bots are intended to make humans more effective and valuable – not less.

Bots can handle many of the basic customer experience tasks, but certainly not all. When journey and life events become more complex, the complementary nature of AI and human engagement still guarantees exceptional relationships.

For the CX industry, it’s fair to say that bots offer a compelling value proposition in that they promise to streamline contact center tasks and make human operators more efficient and really more valuable.

It’s critical, though, that they be designed into the overall customer journey rather than siloed into a separate ecosystem. For chatbots to be a viable CX tool going forward, organisations must become adept at managing them within the context of an omnichannel user experience. 

Source

"Engage enterprises and customers in real time conversations"

Engage enterprises and customers in real time conversations

Saturday, August 26, 2017

how chatbots enable brands to help customers without any intervention


Striking the right balance between automation and the human element is key 


Get customer service right, and you’ve got an advocate for life. Get it wrong and it can damage the perception of your brand and, as a result, your balance sheet.

Today’s consumers are more refined and demanding than ever. Instant gratification, whether in the form of 24/7 food ordering, taxis or information, has become such a large part of our life that limitations in service delivery, like hold times or untrained staff are causing brands high levels of customer attrition.

An estimated two-thirds of customers have left brands due to bad service

As smartphone owners, we already interact with bots every day, from automated text messages for reservations, shipments or payments to daily news alerts.

Many have yet to learn about the brilliance of chatbots as well as how it will revolutionise customer service technology.

Countless brands and journalists discussed how using this technology will revolutionise everything. But will we all be communicating with bots in a few years? Is this the tipping point for how brands interact with customers? One thing seems clear; this is where disruption meets innovation in a technological tour de force.

Taking customer experience to a new level


"Chat Engage enterprises and customers in real time conversations"

Engage enterprises and customers in real time conversations

 

We’re now standing at a crossroads where established industries that are reliant on legacy systems must innovate or fall behind as they try to compete with agile, digitally native start-ups.

Scrambling to retrofit solutions into current infrastructure is a tricky challenge, as any clash between a brand and its customers could have a drastic impact not just on interaction and engagement but also on revenue and profit.

New technologies such as mobile messaging and the integration of social platforms with more established customer service technology, allow consumers to stay connected wherever they might be. With the ability to instantly connect with brands offering a stepping stone to helping solve customer service problems.

Companies that can master these new technologies will thrive in today’s customer centric environment. Those that don’t, risk becoming disrupted and sidelined by consumers.

Striking the right balance between automation and personal connection is key to good customer service. Although chatbots tend to solve problems that weren’t huge issues to begin with, an over reliance on bots could distance the customer from human interaction especially during the crucial moments that matter the most.

That said, the beauty of increasingly sophisticated and intelligent customer service apps is that the bots will know when it’s time to escalate the conversation to a live person.

Successful customer service teams will soon be a blended alliance of chatbots and human experts. Brands competing in the ever-crowded m-commerce marketplace can’t afford to lose customers based on CX failures and this means establishing a partnership between automated and human-led assistance that can create meaningful conversations and establish a genuine 1:1 experience with the customer.

Artificial intelligence isn’t equipped to deal with more complex or more nuanced situations that customers face on a daily basis. So although it’s perfectly fine to get excited about bots, it’s also critical to remember that the main reason people love messaging is because of the human being on the other end.

Chatbots: trainee advisors

The real value behind chatbot capability is the integration of chatbots and customer services within one comprehensive platform. Chatbots are designed to carry out simple tasks and simulate a conversation.

For basic tasks such as ordering flowers, getting delivery updates or making a reservation, customers don’t need much assistance making a chatbot the ideal form of communication.

However, if they need extra help, the consumer must be able to smoothly transition from a chatbot to a human, much like transitioning from a trainee to their manager. Consumers need to feel safe in the knowledge that someone is available to jump into a conversation at any point to ensure their need is met.

And it’s this ability to serve each individual, in the way they want, that will make all the difference in terms of delivering a more positive customer experience. Delegating the more basic and mundane FAQs to bots while leaving more complex conversations to advisors will have significant cost benefits for businesses.

Customer satisfaction driving business success

The real triumph of chat bots will be that by dealing with the routine and perfunctory, it will free up live human agents to spend more time with customers who need the most human assistance.

This filtering of customers according to need, may just represent the return to a service culture not seen for a long time. It will also mean customer care teams can really focus on delivering timely personalised assistance to consumers, based on their precise demands.

The need for human interaction is innate and won’t be replaced any time soon. Creating meaningful engagements that breed long-term connected relationships is crucial to driving loyalty, which in turn delivers its own business benefits.

Chatbots don’t spell the end of human customer service agents, quite the contrary. The introduction of chatbots provides an opportunity to refocus on true quality service and delivery.

Without a delicate balance between machine and human, we’ll hit a wall yet again, much as we have with Interactive Voice Response – the unhelpful bots on the other end of the 0800 number. As long as organisations understand that, then they’ll be taking a step in the right direction.

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Friday, August 25, 2017

how to ensure your chatbots focus on Customers


Chatbots are all the rage right now but they’re virtually useless unless enterprises nail the customer experience. Here’s how to ensure your chatbot initiative pays off. 


Fewer technologies have garnered more attention over the past year than chatbots, those virtual assistants that mimic human speech while facilitating tasks on behalf of humans, typically via a conversational messaging interface. At a time when software is driving unprecedented levels of automation, companies are using chatbots to help customers order anything from food to office supplies to additional computing capacity.

Chatbots are a big reason why corporate adoption of cognitive systems and AI will drive worldwide revenues from nearly $8 billion in 2016 to more than $47 billion in 2020, according to IDC. But what exactly makes a great chatbot? Perhaps more importantly given enterprises' investments in such tools, what makes a bad one? What precautions should CIOs take in building them?

Chatbots are all about the customers


"Engage enterprises and customers in real time conversations "

Engage enterprises and customers in real time conversations

 

A great chatbot is designed, implemented and deployed based on a deep understanding of a company's customers.That means your chatbot initiative must have clear customer experience mandates, goals and key performance indicators that enable it to add demonstrable and measurable value for the user and the brands. "Whether that’s more convenient purchases, streamlined conversational support, or elevating your experience of a live event, the chatbot needs to take the customer experience to a new level of engagement".

The best chatbots can be continuously improved by line-of-business employees. Conversable, for example, has built an adaptive response system called Aqua that uses machine learning to identify broken queries, and allows employees to write and modify chatbot responses.If your chatbot isn’t getting better, it’s definitely getting worse.

Conversable has documented its chatbot-building process:
  • Design the conversation: Identify the best use cases in customers' existing operations and write out the conversation flows. Generally there are multiple stakeholders involved, varying depending on the customer, but it spans business and IT.
  • Build the conversation: Think of this as the 1.0 of the final product. Test drive to make sure the experience as a whole is up to par. Revisions to the conversation flows and other facets of the experience happen at this stage.
  • System integration: This is classic integration work. Conversable enables webhooks to make sure the data needed for each conversation flow is available. For example, if someone wants to know the price of a product, or how many calories are in a menu item, we need to pull on that data on-demand during the conversation.
  • Learning: This is a human and machine collaboration to improve algorithms. Too many people assume you can just set an AI loose and it will figure it out.
  • Expansion: Think of this as enabling more sophisticated conversations, expanding to other important areas where customers have questions or needs. People often leap from one topic to the next during a conversation, and there’s a relationship somewhere in that leap. When you identify a relationship between one conversation and another, easily linking the flows saves customers a lot of time, and ensures the chatbot can stick with the user as an organic conversation unfolds.
  • Advanced AI: This is all about continuous improvement over time. You’re not done once you push the chatbot live, and our technology makes it easy to analyze what’s happening in bot-user interactions and identify areas to improve. With that data in hand, you can increase the sophistication of your chatbot using our AI.

While every customer is a little different, we stick very closely to this process because it consistently gets us in production in weeks rather than the many months of development you can see elsewhere.

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Wednesday, August 23, 2017

how the global a2p sms market include promotional campaigns over content delivery

A2P SMS is the communication taking place between an application and a subscriber over messaging services for various purposes. 

 

"Dynamically Send, Receive & Enhance Text Message Campaigns."

Dynamically Send, Receive & Enhance Text Message Campaigns.


With the evolution of smartphones accompanied with the emergence of OTT players in the market, the MNO’s have seen a sharp dip in the revenues earned from P2P (Peer-to-Peer) messaging services.

However, there has been a parallel increase in the A2P SMS revenues for MNOs globally.

SMS can reach to a customer’s even in the remotest area where there is a network connection and eventually becomes the easiest mode of communication with the customer.

Distinct from instant messaging services, SMS service can function on standard and basic mobiles and it doesn’t depend on an internet connection to work.

The reach and flexibility of SMS services when compared to online services is much more and the advantage of pre-paid mobile users still receiving text messages even if they’re out of balance gives the mode an upper hand. Some of the key features of messaging is that it achieves higher read rate within minutes and boasts the highest engagement rate when compared to emails and OTT mobile messaging apps.

Eventually, with customers more likely to open messages than emails, it is vivid that A2P market would be driven due to this.

we have segmented the A2P SMS market by type, application, and business model and vertical. The type segment of A2P SMS market includes Cloud API Messaging Platform and Traditional & Managed Messaging Services.

On the basis of applications the A2P SMS market is broadly segmented into Pushed Content Services, Interactive Services, Promotional Campaigns, CRM Services and Other Services. Moreover, the market for A2P SMS is bifurcated on the basis of vertical that have large applications of A2P SMSs that include BFSI, Retail, Media & Entertainment, Travel & Transport , Hospitality and other vertical sectors that find large applications of A2P SMSs.

On the basis of geography, the A2P SMS market is analyzed into North America, Europe, Asia- Pacific (APAC), Middle East & Africa (MEA) and South America (SAM).

The global A2P SMS market is estimated to grow at a CAGR of 4.4% during the forecast period 2016 – 2025 and accounts for US$ 62.10 Bn in the year 2025. One of the prime factors that are driving the demands for A2P SMS adoptions is increasing number of mobile phone subscribers globally making it ubiquitous devices for communication purposes.

BFSI sector has witnessed large developments in the last decade. Consumer data safety and the importance of marketing strategies has been put forth as the prime factors while designing A2P campaigns for any industry vertical.

The ubiquitous nature of SMS services has favored the growth of A2P SMS market significantly A2P messages are being used by banks, healthcare institutions for reminders, mobile event ticketing, One Time Passwords (OTP), flight & train updates, promotional activities and polling contests. to name a few. To be assured of maximum reach out to the customers, one can’t rely only on the services of OTT players.

Instead, the maximum reach out can be achieved through SMS services. Reason being, globally still in many regions there are mobile phone users who do not subscribe for mobile internet services.

As the OTT players generally require internet connection to ensure the delivery of messages, SMS services have been preferred by organizations in the recent past.

The mobile phone user internet penetration in the world is still on the lower side. While in developed countries, the mobile phone user internet penetration is high, in many developing and under developed countries of the world, the penetration of mobile phone internet is very low and SMS is the best preferred medium for communication to ensure maximum reach. 

Tuesday, August 22, 2017

how enterprises are seeking the use of a2p sms as a channel for customer engagement


"Enterprise Mobile Messaging"

Deploy a mobile ready messaging strategy across your organization


Historically referred to as A2P, Application to Person or Application-2-Person, is the term used to refer to the automated communication occurring between a business and its customers.

Ranging in age from the 25-year-old SMS (Short Message Service) to the brand new RCS (Rich Communication Services), these technologies are at different stages in terms of their development and geographical presence, with adoption rates varying significantly across the globe.

Undoubtedly, though, SMS is the most well-established of A2P communications, says Matthew Winters of Veoo, with the majority of consumers showing a preference to communicating with companies in this way. In fact, a recent Enterprise Messaging Survey found that the use of A2P SMS continues to surge, with Ovum forecasting 1.28 trillion messages by 2019 up from 1.16 trillion in 2016.

But why? Well, we know from experience that businesses find it a safe and cost-effective way to build trusted relationships and communicate with their customers. In addition, fast delivery is a huge plus thanks to short latency and high throughput rates.

The growth of A2P SMS, driven by enterprise to consumer communications, continues to be strong for the following key reasons:

  • It is the only truly universal communication mechanism, which, irrespective of technology, has the ability to reach 7 billion devices and over 5 billion people globally
  • It uses the only global addressing system in the world, ie. the mobile phone number
  • It is a trusted and reliable communications channel
  • It is facilitated by a mature and well-established global technical and commercial infrastructure
  • And finally, customers are now able to send replies by 2-Way SMS

Until recently, solutions such as A2P SMS or Value-Added Services (VAS) were not significant revenue sources for mobile network operators (MNOs) when compared to voice, roaming fees and peer-to-peer SMS. A2P SMS was, therefore, not given the same attention by MNOs in terms of the commercial opportunities available to them.

However, regulatory and market shifts over the last 10 years, coupled with the huge adoption rates of smartphones and their effect on mobile usage, have elevated A2P SMS to a key position within an MNO’s business strategy and is becoming an increasingly important source of revenue.

The perception that the opportunity of A2P SMS is limited to marketing has also changed. Many new internet-based services use A2P SMS for mission-critical communications such as verification or notifications, appointment reminders, and a variety of alerts, including those related to public-service announcements by schools and local government.

One of the most familiar example comes from its adoption by banks and credit card institutions for the issuance of one-time passwords (OTPs) to verify transactions entered onto a webpage. OTPs can also be applied outside of the financial services industry as a step in verifying a customer for retail e-commerce transactions. SMS messaging supports the security of e-commerce sites whilst providing peace of mind and reassurance to the purchaser receiving the code.

Figures on the actual and forecast size of the A2P SMS market vary but there is consensus amongst analysts that the value of the market is significant: a high-level estimate suggests that in 2016, more than 1 trillion A2P SMS were sent globally on an annual basis, worth between US$10 billion (€8.48 billion) and US$90 billion (€76.29 billion).

A2P SMS must keep evolving to ensure that it remains relevant in the enterprise messaging context and that it captures the seemingly open-ended opportunities for innovation and market growth. By implementing the fundamental basic requirements, businesses can then shift their focus onto developing more innovative services and continue to support both the wider industry and their own customers.

Source

Monday, August 21, 2017

how enterprise texting help users to communicate instantly



It’s not surprising that many employees are using text to communicate with customers. Workers, like the customers they serve, have become accustomed to messaging’s intuitive structure and fast interactions.

Like customers, employees are often on the go, but always have access to their smartphones, and texting is the most widely and frequently used smartphone feature, according to a Pew Research report.

Texting the simplest, most natural way of communicating. But for businesses, it isn’t necessarily the best way. Customer threads can get lost amid a multitude of personal texts. Your employees may not be delivering messages with the right tone or the right message for maximum effectiveness. Personal texts look unprofessional, and they expose employees’ personal phone numbers to customers.

Enterprise Texting Gives You Control



"Enterprise Mobile Messaging"

Enterprise Mobile Messaging

 

With enterprise texting, you have administrative control over all your company’s messages. Employees don’t ever give out their personal phone numbers.

You can divide workers into teams and create a shared inbox for each team. A team has a single phone number customers can text. Though it appears to the customer that they’re texting one person, the whole team can view the conversation. If one person is out sick or goes on vacation, it’s easy for someone else to step in, providing customers a seamless experience.

With enterprise texting, you’re in charge of deciding who does what. For example, you may create a VIP inbox that matches large-account customers with experienced sales people. You can rearrange teams, adding or subtracting members at any time. If someone leaves the company, you can remove their access to all past conversations.

You can also create customized templates for frequently asked questions, making employee responses faster and ensuring that your company provides a consistent message that aligns with your brand.

Mining Data

Another important feature of enterprise texting is that it lets you download and archive SMS conversations. You can export them to a .txt file and store it anywhere, including an email program, where you can do keyword searches that reveal what products or topics customers are interested in.

You can search conversations to make sure your sales people follow up with the right customers. For example, if you sell electronics, you could search for conversations in the past week containing the phrase “OLED TV” to find customers who are interested, but have not yet committed to purchasing. You could then assign sales people with the best track record in selling that product to follow up with those leads.

Storing searchable texts is also helpful if you’re in a regulated industry like finance or healthcare, where audits are required.

Customers want to communicate with your business by text, and your employees are eager to oblige. But don’t settle for unprofessional personal messaging.

Source

Sunday, August 20, 2017

sms texting is the most widely used form of communication for recruiting




Texting is the most widely used form of communication, especially with millennials as 83% open text messages within 90 seconds, according to research from mobile engagement specialist OpenMarket. Here are a few ways to take your recruitment efforts to new heights with texting:

Send messages anytime, anywhere

With 91% of adults keeping their smartphones within arm’s reach, according to US website Facts Legend, nearly all working professionals have their phone with them at all times. Texting provides a quick and effective way of reaching your recruits on the go at anytime and anyplace. Emails have a low read rate of only about 20%, so using texting to instantly reach potential candidates will result in an increase in applications.

Attract qualified applicants

With a 98% read rate, texting potential prospects will ensure your job posting are seen and reduce the amount of time spent tirelessly searching for suitable applicants. By using multiple keywords for each of your departments, you can effectively target qualified prospects. All you do is post the keyword, then sit back as prospects text in to receive text notifications of future job openings.

Speed up the recruitment process with automated text messages

An obstacle in the recruitment process that wastes substantial time is contacting prospects to co-ordinate interview times, provide paperwork and notify them of important deadlines. These time-consuming tasks could be significantly shortened by implementing automated text messaging. Simply schedule messages to be sent at specific times or when certain actions occur, then allow the workflow to guide your applicant through the recruitment process.

Keep applicants informed with news and information

A great way to keep applicants interested in your company is by sending them the latest news and information. Text messaging can quickly share valuable information and news about your company. To keep the information relevant, set up keywords for each of your positions. For example, if they text the ‘Marketing’ keyword, they will receive information regarding your marketing positions.

Engage applicants more efficiently with text messages

Before an interview, applicants will have questions, concerns and scheduling conflicts that will need to be addressed; SMS can effectively solve these issues in a timely manner. Applicants can ask questions, receive real-time answers and notify potential employers of any issues that may arise. 


"Dynamically Send, Receive & Enhance Text Message Campaigns."

Dynamically Send, Receive & Enhance Text Message Campaigns.



In conclusion, texting creates the highest response rate of any form of communication, with a 7.5 times higher rate than email. By utilising a text instead of a phone call, the candidates can respond on their own time while on the go. Take your job recruitment to new heights by implementing text messaging today!

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