Using Bots and AI to Improve Your Business - Part 1
You are a business. You want to sell more stuff. You want your customers to be happier. Here’s how Bots and AI can help.
At Small Robot Company we like to avoid hype and nonsense, and if there is one place right now where hype is king, it’s in the world of Bots.
We have spent most of the last year getting to a position where we feel comfortable with the marketplace and thought we should pass on our learnings to you.
We have reviewed a range of Bot services and platforms, and judged them against user needs with an aim to give you an understanding of which are the best tools for the job, and how much support you would need to get them working properly for you.
But, as we are about all experiences, we first wanted to establish what you can realistically do with Bots, and the supporting AI and machine learning cleverness that underpins them.
How It All Works
Firstly, what is AI, what is a bot, and how do machines learn? These phrases are often bandies about interchangeably, so let’s quickly define them. Sorry if this is a bit basic!
1. The Bot Itself
The bot is basically just a way of using messages to communicate. It allows interaction between two or more entities. Let’s hope at least one of them is a human. Some services allow for multiple choice shortcuts, or recommended answers. Some include payments. But basically, it is just chat.
2. Artificial Intelligence
There is much confusion as to what AI is. To put it simply, Artificial Intelligence is clever tech that can understand you a bit better, and give you better answers. This may be based on a better understanding of you and what you like, of the subject matter you are talking about, or of the subtlety of the language you are using.
3. Machine Learning
Machine learning is at the heart of AI, in that it allows an Artificial Intelligence to take in new information from you or other sources, learn from that information, and ultimately use that learning to improve its future conversations. At the moment, it is mainly focused on a thing called Pattern Matching, which is pretty simple to understand. You allow it to interact with the subject matter or people, and tell it when it is going wrong. Eventually it recognises patterns in its mistakes and uses those patterns to give better answers.
4. The Dream System
What everyone is working towards is a system that uses a combination of these three things to provide such a realistic experience for people that they won’t realise it is not human. Arguably, it is striving for a situation where the experience is better than human, as in it is more accurate, and less likely to make mistakes or let feelings get in the way. And of course, it can then be scaled infinitely at little cost.
What Can I Use Bots For?
OK, now we have that nailed, let’s think about what you would want to use them for.
1. I Want to Make my Unhappy Customers Happy
The origin of Bots comes from that little dialogue box on any home page. Once solely the reserve of people from Richmond to Rajapur sitting in an office fielding questions, companies are moving towards answering the more basic questions by bot.
It is the holy grail of this type of bot to be able to field all questions without people, but at the moment the AI isn’t quite there, and even the smartest bits of tech (such as Watson) need a long time to learn the nuances of language and ‘tone’.
2. I Want to Make Discovering Stuff About My Company Easier
Another Holy Grail of the Bot world. The dream is that, instead of trying to understand the structure of a company’s website, you can just ask a bot a quick question. You don’t need to even go to the website. You could just do it to a certain WhatsApp account or telephone number via iMessage.
In principle this is simple, but it is at the core of SRC’s consultancy work. A company has to firstly stop thinking about itself from an internal perspective. It then needs to understand its customers more deeply. It then needs to understand the mindsets that its customers have when they want to interact. It finally needs to understand how much information it should give back. How much is useful, and how much is just noise.
3. I Want to Make Buying Stuff From Me Easier
An extension of the previous point. If you own a company that sells stuff directly (rather than purely in channel), it must be a goal to let people find what they want to buy easily. The ultimate realisation of this would be if I could let a specific brand know I wanted a blue shirt. It would know my size, my budget, my stylistic preference AND my favourite shade of blue, and come back with my perfect shirt. And an option to buy.
4. I Want to be Able to Answer Complicated Questions
So this is the area where AI and a conversational experience could bring the most value. A lot of B2B products have products that are heavily customizable, with complex pricing structures. It is the bane of most UX designers’ lives to try and simplify these. What if you could have a chat about your needs with a bot, and then get the exact setup you needed?
5. I Want to Create a Dialogue With My Customers
Of course you do. Because brands are a conversation now, aren’t they? So, if you are looking for a place to allow people to talk (rather than complain) en masse then a bot would seem to be the ideal model.
A possible answer would be to make a friendly experience that makes no bones about it’s bottiness. Something that plays on its artificialility.
But unless you are the sort of brand that people will naturally want to talk to, beware! Also, your brand will take a battering if people think you are ‘palming them off’ on an automated system.
So Which Bots Are Right For Me?
Hold your horses! In part 2 of this article, we will look at the best platforms and services for building a conversational experience for your business.
