Business 2 CommunityEngagement – You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet
A friend of mine forwarded me a very interesting article from the Wall Street Journal last week. The article was about a chat app very popular with younger people called Kik. The big news was not about Kik, however. Rather, the article was about new bots that are enabling Kik users to converse in real time with brands. You read that right. Having noticed that young users are flocking to chat apps and are willing to spend money but don’t want to be inundated with marketing messages, Kik is trying a brand new approach that allows users to communicate with bots that represent brands.
The article notes:
So imagine this scenario, which is a version of what Mr. Livingston says his team aspires to: Taco Bell wants to roll out a new flavor of Doritos Locos Tacos. Maybe this one is “X-tra spicy,” and it has the personality and verbal tics to match. Fifty or so brand representatives, real human beings, could have chat conversations with customers at the outset, and the chat engine would learn from those interactions, gradually becoming more autonomous, until it could automatically handle thousands of simultaneous conversations.
You might think that people would be way too self-conscious to converse with a bot. If you believe that, you might pay special attention to the part of the article that talks about a robot called Mitsuku. People talk to Mitsuku about everything from dating to problems with bullying. Based on programming that allows the robot to gain real world experience, people can feel like they are actually talking to a real person, even a friend.
This whole conversation reminds me of an amazing book I read a couple of years ago called Alone Together. Written by Sherry Turkle, the book explores several scenarios involving lifelike robots like Mitsuku, and Turkle’s findings are fairly astonishing. For example, when senior citizens at a nursing home were given a little robot baby doll that responded to affection and attention, they began to feel extremely strong ties to their robots after a short while. Indeed, some grandchildren felt that they were being displaced by the care the robots “demanded.” Turkle also explored relationships built through online gaming, where players claim to have extremely deep and close friendships while simultaneously admitting that they don’t know if the people they are talking to are really the gender they represent, and they don’t know the people’s real names.
Brand robots would of course not just be around to offer friendly advice. Ultimately these bots would have the goal of getting product feedback or offering customer service. However, this concept takes the idea of “engagement” to an entirely different level. Now you are not just getting to know your customers, but you’re actually in the business of befriending them.
Are you ready for this new world? If you believe the Wall Street Journal article, it’s dawning rather quickly, whether we’re all ready or not.
Image Credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/genewolf/147722350/ via Creative Commons
This article was syndicated from Business 2 Community: Engagement – You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet
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