Chatbots Go Vertical with the Help of Microsoft and Salesforce
Yesterday, customer service support platform Helpshift announced that it has raised $23 million venture funding to expand its platform. In the announcement, Helpshift makes it clear that it will start leveraging modern chatbot technologies to improve and automate the interactions between brand and customers. The round included two new strategic investors which are themselves very invested in the chatbot market: Microsoft and Salesforce.
Helpshift’s funding round is a great example of chatbot solutions starting to get traction in vertical markets. In the last years, chatbots have become one of the hottest trends in the technology market with technology giants like Google, Facebook and Microsoft releasing new platforms in the space. However, while the battle for chatbot platforms will continue to heat up between the big messaging platforms and a handful of upcoming startups, the initial sources of revenue might be in vertically specialized chatbots that leverage conversational interfaces and natural languages to solve very specific industry problems.
Customer Service is the Ideal Scenario for Chatbots
The funding round for Helpshift should not come as a surprise. In addition to the remarkable traction that the company has seen in the last few years, it is operating in a market that is ideal for the introduction of smart chatbots. Customer service solutions present a few characteristics that make it a strong target for leveraging chatbot and AI technologies:
· Conversational nature: Customer service solutions are conversational in nature. From that standpoint, chatbot solutions that leverage natural language processing can be improve the interactions between brands and customers.
· Interactions can be improved by learning: Customer service interactions can be improved by actively learning about customer preferences, historical interaction patterns etc. Many times, that information is not timely available to customer service agents. Smart chatbot platforms can actively process natural language and formulate answers by combining thouhsands of data points that can be relevant to that specific customer.
· It doesn’t require complete automation: Differently from many other scenarios, chatbots in the customer service space can combined human and AI-powered interactions. In some scenarios, chatbots can formulate answers directly to a customer while in others can assist the customer service agent with relevant information to formulate the correct answer.
Expect Incumbents to be Active Venture Investors in the Bot Market
The fact that Microsoft and Salesforce opted for participating in Helpshift’s funding round is also a very relevant point. Both vendors are expected to be very active in the bot technology space. Microsoft has already released very innovative bot solutions such as the Microsoft Bot Framework, Cortana and even a couple of “smart bots” such as Tay and Rowe. Salesforce hasn’t yet released any specific bot technology but we should expect bots to be a natural extension of Salesforce’ product such as CRM or Service Cloud. By investing in bot solutions like Helpshift, Microsoft and Salesforce are increasing their options to be a dominant force in the smart bot revolution.
