Hello, Can I Help You?
The Awful Truth About My Youth
I was an awkward teenager, my bones a little too long with not nearly enough meat on them, almost always with the wrong haircut, completely and utterly unable to comfortably bridge the gender canyon — you can imagine how much fun I had trawling the mall for clothes that had absolutely zero chance of fitting. With my mum.
I hated shopping for clothes!
Too Cool For U
The feeling persists to this day. I can’t count the times I’ve walked into a shop only to be met by a once-over from some too-cool-for-you hipster and a patronizing “Can I help you?”. The words are said in a tone that is meant to reduce your confidence to zero and firmly put you in your proper place in the hierarchy of cool; just below his or her pug, just above a slug. About as amusing as chewing sawdust, I’d rather wear hand-me-downs from my cousins wardrobe á 1997.
Just Browsing
Another scenario, equally annoying, is when you walk into a store and an overly excited, overly friendly member of staff pounces on you to ask you if they can help you. They’ll inquire as to your preference of this-or-that, and you will of course tell them that you’re ‘only browsing’. The staff member, slightly offended, pulls back a few meters and continues to watch your every move in quiet anticipation.
In short, for many of us, shopping is a pain only overcome by the necessity of adhering to basic social convention such as wearing clothes.
Interwebs To The Rescue
Over the last 15 years, e-commerce has grown considerably. The fences of the past have been torn down and there are very few thresholds left to prevent us from doing our shopping online.
However, the user experience online is still one of quiet exploration and sometimes just dumb luck.
Amazon has done very well with their recommendations and employ some serious algorithms to serve you the appropriate content as “suggestions”, but it’s still very much a case of self-service.
Messenger Bots are shaping up to become the new shop assistants, and they’re not hipsters or overly helpful (unless you really want them to be). They are your friends. Well, they might as well be considering they know everything about you. They will do their best to help you fulfill your goals or needs.
In the near future you’ll be able to click a button in a webshop, on your mobile or on the desktop version, and you’ll be taken to a chat with a virtual shop assistant who can help you much the same way a real shop assistant could. Only this assistant knows you. They already know who you are. They’ll know already if you’re looking to loose a little weight or if you just broke up with your girlfriend. They know where you are, where you live, wether you went to a party last night.. They know what kind of music you like and will extrapolate from that what kind of style you’re likely to have. I could go on for another page or two, but you get the picture. These assistants will be the most helpful ‘people’ to ever grace the face of the earth with their presence. And not in that annoying overly helpful way, but in a sincere and just-right way. Why? Because, like I said, they will know everything about you.
Content Chaos
The downside of e-commerce is that the pages often hold too much content. Thousands of items in too many sizes and models. It doesn’t give you the overview you might get from a physical store.
Amazon attempts to solve this with their recommendations. Which probably yields millions in additional sales every month. However, it’s still impersonal and slightly bewildering. And you still have to find what you’re looking for in the first place.
So, if you’re not in the mood to browse through endless pages of online items that hold no interest for you, you may just want to open your Facebook Messenger app and tell it what you’re looking for -roughly. Say a pair of sneakers. And just a few seconds later a curated selection of bots will present itself. Select one and tell it what’s on your mind.
Bot: Hey you. How’s life? Were you looking for some sneakers?
You: I need some sneakers yeah.
Bot: Sure, any type in particular? {list options for relevant sneakers}
you: I was looking for something that’s nice enough for work, but comfortable to wear and not too formal.
Bot: Sure. How about something like this? {list of shoes that are tailored to your request, personality and past shopping behavior}
…And so it continues.
A God Send For Businesses, Big And Small
For businesses this is an obvious godsend. I’m sure that in the future, bots will handle psychiatry and related tasks, but in the immediate future they will solve two specific tasks for people who run an online business.
- They will be virtual shop assistants with the ability to make a sale for you (read: the customer can buy the product right in the Messenger app).
- They can handle support and customer care.
The second point is almost as awesome as the first. For some, perhaps even more so (and for some, quite definitely less so). Today there are thousands of people working in call centers around the world. A lot of them in India and the Philippines where English language skills are good.
Being able to handle customers, with their questions and needs, is vitally important to many businesses. In a very few years we could see virtual assistants doing this job as well, or better, than their human counterparts. Great way to save money for businesses, not so much for the people working at the call centers.
If you mention ‘bots’ to developers, many of them will say something in the lines of “This isn’t new. We’ve had bots for nearly two decades now”. The infamous Turing test is built around this idea. What’s new is the mind bending pace at which AI is being developed. Incidentally AI is the second of Facebook’s three 10 year goals (Connectivity and AR/VR being the two other). I’ve written about AI in the past as well. This is an area of research that is poised to fundamentally alter the world we live in. Hopefully for the better.
The Next Step
For now we have AI powered “bots” online. Tomorrow we might have similar AI powered robots such as the ones being built by Google owned Boston Dynamics (yes, they are absolutely awesome).
Keep in mind that we’ve been witness to an exponential growth in processing power for many years now. It may have taken us many year to get this far. Getting to the next step will take considerably less time.
What Should You Do?
Run for the hills! … Just kidding. If you have a small or a large business either physical, online or both — chances are you will likely want to look into the latest development from Facebook with their Messenger Bots. They could most likely help you sell more goods online and help with support. It’s pretty much a no-brainer. Give me a beep and I’ll point you in the general direction. ;)
