[On May 8, Opus Research will convene the Conversational Commerce Conference in London. It will be an assembly of thought-leaders, practitioners, technology providers that support advertising, marketing, customer support in the digital age.]

Now that “Conversational Commerce” is officially a ‘thing’ and I claim to be one of the people who coined the term, it’s useful to march through its origin, starting with our working definition:

Conversational Commerce is a unified framework that integrates the business practices and technologies required to support purposeful, intelligent, authenticated, conversations between company and customer and accelerates a company’s digital capabilities in a way that best serves employees, prospects, customers and partners.

In mid-1999, Doc Searls, Chis Locke, David Weinberger and Rick Levine issued the first edition of “The Cluetrain Manifesto,” starting a long process of explaining to brands and businesses that the World Wide Web had changed their digital lives forever. Most importantly, it started with a simple observation and proclamation: Markets are Conversations.

Five years later, Opus Research launched “Conversational Access Technologies” (CAT) Program and, in a series of CAT Scans (starting with this one) defined the multi-billion market driven by enterprise investment in Contact Centers, Speech-enabled IVRs, Web Servers, Cloud-based resources and Professional Services.

From CAT to Conversational Commerce
Fast forward another five years and our Conversational Commerce Program was born. Contact Centers support multi-modal and multichannel touch points, Speech-enablement is now augmented with natural language processing (NLP) and cloud-services power intelligent speakers, TVs, appliances, autos and the millions of “post App”, zero UI end-points.

Professional Services have had staying power. They have taken on the important role of helping brands make these resources stretch their intelligence capabilities  and keeping “humans in the loop” as self service strategies have evolved into conversational engagement models. (But that is a digression).

Extracting Meaning from the Words ‘Conversation’ and ‘Commerce’
“Meaning Extraction” is often cited as one of the most important roles of NLP platforms; while “Understanding Intent” in NLU platforms require context, history and sentiment, which is is a huge challenge for “us humans” as well. Understanding the meaning of “Conversations” is a start. Thankfully, in a recent post on the Opus Research Web site, Mitch Lieberman tackled the meaning of the word “conversations” by characterizing them as “the most natural, convenient means to communicate” and “the critical element in support of customers getting their jobs done.”

I totally buy into that characterization, and firmly believe that the platforms for creating better person-to-machine conversations is creating job opportunities that are emerging as one of the great opportunity areas for User Experience (UX) specialists to leverage hard-learned lessons around dialogue design, turn-taking, language models, natural language processing and the emerging area of conversational heuristics. This is especially true as brands sort out how to employ bots, “smart speakers” and virtual agents to market their products and services, make sales and support customers.

This is where we get into the second significant word, “Commerce”. If you Google “define commerce,” here’s what you see:

First up: “The activity of buying and selling, especially on a large scale” doesn’t quite get the full force of Opus Research’s grand vision. The second, even tough the source terms it as “dated” is “social dealings between people”. That meaning corresponds more closely to what I was thinking of when I coined the term. I’m ignoring the third definition, termed “archaic,”: “sexual intercourse.” However, I have to mention that, in my career as an analyst of “premium communications services,” I know that — whether it takes the form of consumer online or “pay-per-call” services s- pornography has a special, and profitable, role to play in industry history.

But enough already. Merriam-Webster’s Web site flips the script on the concept of commerce. Its first definition for the word “commerce” is:

“social intercourse”: “interchange of ideas, opinions, or sentiments”.

Now we’re getting somewhere.

A Unifying Concept for Four Key Activity Areas
At Opus Research, we use the term “Conversational Commerce” as an umbrella that integrates a broad swathe of digital technologies, spanning Intelligent Assistance (customer support), Conversational Marketing (Martech/AdTech), Conversational Intelligence (CRM, knowledge management, “Big Data and Analytics”) and Intelligent Authentication (continuous, friction-free ID assertion and access management).

Today, enterprises treat each area as discrete sets of activities, objects of investment and organizational departments. Yet, in the chatbot-infused world of real-time conversations among companies, their prospects, customers, departmental employees and even agents, the disaggregated tactic is a mistake.

For instance, cumbersome authentication practices have long been a customer experience nightmare. Forgotten passwords, unrecognized challenge questions and unsuccessful delivery of one-time-codes slow down or totally prevent conversational commerce. Ill-timed and poorly targeted emails or outbound text messages are the bane of e-marketers. Programmatically-generated purchase recommendations have also been the bane of social networks and comparison shopping sites.

Looking from the inside out, businesses have long known that customers (and even fraudsters) shop around or make repeated contact across multiple touch points, including live agents, until they get the answers they want or accomplish their ultimate objectives. Likewise, brands are haunted by the inefficiencies of current AdTech. The vast majority of emails go unopened and “click-through” rates are “good” if they are in the 7% range and are often abysmal.

Defining The Way Forward
All of these #FAILS can prove to be expensive. The time it takes to authenticate callers into customer care contact centers costs businesses billions of dollars. Likewise for ill-targeted emails which have low read rates and much lower “click-throughs”. A unified approach to Conversational Commerce solves these problems, helps avoid stranded investment and reduces operating costs. But moving to that approach can be daunting because it is directly in the way of existing organizational structures and defies corporate inertia.

“Conversational Commerce” provides a framework for providing correct answers and recommendations to both prospects and customers consistently and at scale. It spans both technology and business “stacks”, by inviting all concerned parties – across multiple business units and professional disciplines – to engage in a company’s digital transformation in a way that best serves customers and provides competitive advantage.

Categories: Conversational Intelligence, Intelligent Assistants, Intelligent Authentication, Articles, Mobile + Location