Skip to main content

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.

xxx

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

There is no excuse for not taking cards

So we went to the pub. For lunch. Seven of us. Say £20 per head. £100+ quid. Say £50 quid gross for the pub. Colleague goes to order food and drinks and pay at the bar. Apologetic barmaid comes over to explain that their “card machine” is down, so she can only accept cash. Under normal circumstances I would have simply walked out, feeling it wholly inappropriate to reward such a poorly managed establishment and, as a functioning actor in a capitalist economy, done my duty to depress their lunchtime takings. Here’s what we wanted to say: This is absurd. This is 2016 not 1916. Your card machine is down? Well, so what! Are you seriously telling me that mein host has no mobile phone number capable of registering for PingIt or PayM? That none of the staff or the pub itself have a PayPal account that I can send the money to? That neither the owners nor managers not contingency planners thought to tuck an iZettle behind the bar to use when the clunky and expensive GPRS terminal fails for o...

Financial Cryptography: Corda Day - a new force

Forum friend Ian Grigg, who I always take very seriously indeed on any such topic, wrote about Corda on his blog and concluded with a powerful statement. Bitcoin told the users it wanted an unstoppable currency - sure, works for a small group but not for the mass market. Ethereum told their users they need an unstoppable machine - which worked how spectacularly with the DAO? Not. What. We. Wanted. Corda is the only game in town because it's the only one that asked the users. It's that simple. From Financial Cryptography: Corda Day - a new force xxx It seems to me, however, what Ian is pointing to as the greatest strength of their approach is also the greatest weakness. A staple feature of unimaginative management consultants presentations about innovation is some variation on the statement by Henry Ford that if you had asked users what they wanted, they would have asked for faster horses coupled with some variation on the statement by Steve jobs that it was pointless ask...

We could fix mobile security, you know. We don't, but we could

Earlier in the week I blogged about mobile banking security , and I said that in design terms it is best to assume that the internet is in the hands of your enemies. In case you think I was exaggerating… The thieves also provided “free” wireless connections in public places to secretly mine users’ personal information. From Gone in minutes: Chinese cybertheft gangs mine smartphones for bank card data | South China Morning Post Personally, I always use an SSL VPN when connected by wifi (even at home!) but I doubt that most people would ever go to this trouble or take the time to configure a VPN and such like. Anyway, the point is that the internet isn’t secure. And actually SMS isn’t much better, which is why it shouldn’t really be used for securing anything as important as home banking. The report also described how gangs stole mobile security codes – which banks automatically send to card holders’ registered mobile phones to verify online transactions – by using either a Trojan...