Why Decision Data is the Future of Business-to-Consumer Relationships

Stop making your customers repeat themselves

Have you ever called or messaged a businesses, but had to repeat the same things over and over again? Shouldn’t they remember what you bought last week, or that you just chatted customer support yesterday?

Wouldn’t it be nice if you didn’t have to have the same conversation with a business every time you interacted with it?

What if a business remembered the things you had explicitly told them before, and used that information to make your experience better? I’m not talking about cookies or ad retargeting. I’m talking about the information you choose to tell the business yourself in a conversation.

It’s difficult for businesses to currently accomplish this. There’s no place where they’re saving and analyzing your conversations with them. It’s a jumbled mess with little to no analytics, which results in the repeated conversations that make you pull your hair out.

However, bots on messaging apps like Messenger change that equation, because now the technology exists to dynamically analyze conversations, save customer choices and preferences, and create new experiences based on those choices — instantaneously.

What is Decision Data?

You make multiple decisions in every conversation you have. “What are you craving for dinner tonight?” “Are you interested in a demo?” “Do you have pets?”

This interaction feels natural in our daily conversations with humans (and sometimes our pets), and we learn more about each other through these conversations.

Chatbots should work in exactly the same way. What if the choices users make in their interaction with a chatbot (or a voicebot) helped steer future conversations and personalize them — in the same way our conversations with friends are personalized.

This is what we call Decision Data. Decision data is the data you get from explicit choices a user makes when conversing with a business or entity. It is comprised of the decisions a person makes as they have a conversation, primarily through messaging apps.

Decision data is the data you get from explicit choices a user makes when conversing with a business or entity.

Decision data is different than every other type of information available to businesses on the Internet. Unlike retargeting, decision data is concrete and voluntary —there is no guessing what choices someone makes in a bot, and it comes through conversations that users voluntarily start. And unlike surveys, decision data is natural — it comes through the natural flow of a conversation.

Bots of the future will utilize decision data to make themselves smarter. With decision data, bots will remember your past choices and use that to personalize future conversations. Decision data is beginning to power machine learning algorithms that will eventually make talking to a bot more like talking to a friend.

Decision Data: The Beginning of Conversational Personalization

Earlier today at MobileBeat — VentureBeat’s conference on new mobile technologies — we announced Decision Data from Octane AI. Decision Data is an analytics tool that lets you understand the decisions your users are making in conversations with your brand, and take action based upon that insight:

Maroon 5 — an Octane AI customer — is using Decision Data to understand the preferences of their fans through the natural flow of conversation. They don’t need surveys, intrusive cookies, or ad pixels — all of which are more intrusive and provide less relevant data.

Decision Data from Octane AI shows you the number of people who choose each option you present within a conversation, along with percentages. It also provides a history of decisions and revisions. That way, you can update your bot’s conversations and see the impact those changes make on your bot’s future conversations.

Decision Data from Octane AI is currently in private beta. If you want to be one of the first to try Decision Data, contact us.

Decision Data is just the first step towards solving the problem of conversational personalization. We are rolling out new features built on top of Decision Data that will let you do so much more. Stay tuned.

One of the great promises of chatbots has been that they will understand our needs and preferences and tailor their conversations with us based on our conversations with them. Decision data is an important step towards that promise.

~ Ben

Octane AI Head of Product Megan Berry contributed to this article.