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POST Chat is it

We said at the end of last year that conversational commerce would be one of the key themes for 2018 and as the year unfolds this prediction is looking spot on. Customers like messaging, and if we (ie, the payments industry) can add payments to that channel then it stands poised to gain a significant fraction of the what now seems almost quaintly called the electronic commerce sector.

It looks as if “chat” is a good place for companies to start. Here’s an example. Israel Discount Bank rolled out the Personetics engine through a virtual assistant service “Didi” and has had 200,000+ customers use it. The top three learnings so far make for interesting reading.

  1. Customers ask deeper questions of a virtual assistant than you’d think. ‘If a customer has a loan, he will go into specific questions about refinancing loans,’ Frishman said. ‘We covered loans [in Didi’s answer base], but we didn’t think they would go so deep.’ Discount is rolling out a new customer relationship management system, to which Didi is connected. So if Didi can’t answer a question, the customer will be forwarded to a human agent. The agent receives a record of the conversation with the bot. This lessens the chance that the customer will need to answer a question more than once. In a recent survey conducted by eGain, 59% of respondents (62% in the U.S. and 55% in the U.K.) found that having to repeat information and context to a human agent after handoffs from chatbots was the biggest hassle by far in using virtual assistants. This is a result of chatbot deployments that are disconnected from agent assistance.

  2. Customers prefer texting over any other mode of communication.

  3. Customers would rather ask for something than look for it. I can relate to this. If I can't see what I want on the bank landing page, I'll pick up the phone and go to the chatbot. Actually, last time I used this I got quite annoyed with it because it (I don't know whether it was a person or not) wanted me to confirm my identity when the question that I wanted to ask had absolutely nothing to do with who I am.

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