In this blog post, the folks at Drift.ai expose some not-so-shocking results of analysis of today’s digital sales and marketing efforts. Current methods for advertising and promotion are annoying and taking a conversational approach will help.

While the article is about research addressing cloud-based service providers in general (the “Cloud 100”), the implication for Conversational Commerce and Intelligent Assistance, especially what Drift calls “Conversational Marketing”, is clear. Here are my take-aways:

• “Free” is back in vogue (as if it ever left): This applies to the tools that the likes of Google and Amazon provide for service development and measurement. More importantly, it applies to distribution of content. Make accessibility ungated and you foster growing demand.
• Conversations must replace form filling: According to the article, 79% of companies in the 2018 Cloud 100 still use lead capture forms on their websites. That means that there is a very high probability that, when you click on the “Contact Us”, “Talk to Sales” or “Get a Demo” link on a web site, you are served a Web form. That’s hard to believe and inexcusable.

Old habits die hard. Parallel phenomena plague the worlds of AdTech and Automated Self-Service. Looking at the former, so called “tracking ads” creep people out when the same promotional copy and graphics follow a web browser from site to site and even into mobile apps. Backlash against this type of cyberstalking led billions of people to download and install ad blockers, much to the consternation of industry associations, like the IAB (Internet Advertising Bureau) and advertisers, themselves. Likewise, dissatisfaction with interactive voice response systems and chatbots that are little more than glorified FAQs has inspired callers to “zero out” or loudly blurt “REPRESENTATIVE” trigger a transfer to a live agent.

Marketers and customer care specialists regard these instances of personal expression a “FAIL” as well as an existential threat to their fundamental business models. But it doesn’t have to be so. Branded “Enterprise Intelligent Assistants” (like Capital One’s Eno or Domino’s Dom) are already offering personalized services to repeat clients or customers through mobile apps. Thousands of “virtual chat” agents already grace the “Contact Us” pages of enterprise Web sites to ease the burden of form filling by engaging in a conversation.

In millions of homes, conversational virtual assistants like Siri, Alexa and soon Bixby are poised to assume the role of privacy and security “agents” for their users. Amazon has already given Alexa the power to detect who is speaking based on characteristics of their voice and how they speak. Apple – with its introduction of “Intelligent Tracking Prevention” in the latest version of Safari – is proving to be one of the staunchest advocates of privacy in the form of ad blocking. Siri is vested in privacy as well.

Precision Without Surveillance: Replacing Lucrative Business Modelas

eMarketer sees ad spending on digital media exceeding $100 billion in 2018. Estimates of enterprise spending on customer service vary widely but have been reported as high as $350 billion in this interview with Helpshift’s Abinash Tripathy. Both industries are plagued by known inefficiencies. Tracking ads, for instance, represented an effort to deliver relevant content to targeted individuals or segments as their “journey” took them to multiple sites, devices or apps. Technological advancements have further enhanced the adtech market place by bringing us algorithms to support high-velocity trading of Ad Words and real time analytics to validate the efficacy of delivered messages.

Meanwhile, customer care contact center operators are spending significant capital to add “AI” to their workflows. More specifically they use Machine Learning and other cognitive resources to identify who is calling and summon relevant data or metadata from a variety of sources to guess at the purpose of the call and suggest the best actions to take to resolve issues or complete transactions quickly. These efforts are not enough because they rely on imputed data based on the purchase and aggregation of personal data that can span location, search history, credit history, purchase history and the like. None of which is provided directly from individuals.

While promoting common terminology for “Conversational Commerce” and its technological underpinnings, Opus Research has become a strong advocate of “Precision without Surveillance”. We’re finding that many brands, of necessity in the post-GDPR regime, have design and implemented bots, IVRs and messaging platforms to deliver highly relevant responses based on direct input from individuals. They are aided to a great degree by the fact that Enterprise Intelligent Assistant platform providers have organized their own corpora of data to respond to the most requested categories of information for specific verticals. Privacy and security issues should not be an impediment to providing accurate and relevant answers.

The Lesson for Brands and Advertisers: Be Optimistic

Advertising is, in general, benign because it fosters brand awareness and provides a mechanism for merchants to drive traffic to their stores and to their online sites and checkouts. Advertisers have crossed the line by planting cookies in Web sites and developing other ways to track a customer’s “journey” as he or she moves from site to app to phone call. Most methods for “journey mapping” and customer tracking rely on well-accepted, yet invasive methods for activity tracking. Don Marti, a strategist at Mozilla Foundation and well-respected expert on online advertising makes this observation, “Web advertising is going to finally start working as a business model as soon as we have enough privacy and security.”

He goes on to assert, “Tracking and targeting make an ad medium less valuable on average.” He also observes that placing a limit on tracking and targeting will have the side effect of driving up the value of that medium. Intelligent Assistants can be the conversational front end to that medium. Make no mistake, the way that individuals regularly turn to Alexa or Google Assistant for news headlines, recipes, streamed music has helped the Internet fulfill its role as the ultimate medium for entertainment, information and commerce.

At the same time, they are conditioning individuals to use their own words (Natural Language) to describe what they want to accomplish. With great consistency and frequency, these Intelligent Assistants successfully respond to their owners’ queries and requests. In doing so, they raise confidence that individuals can use their voice or their own words in text to take control and get results from chatbots and virtual assistants. It’s a virtuous cycle.

Just Add Privacy and Security

Recall that Don Marti’s caveat is that success of the new business model relies on adding “enough privacy and security.” A virtual agent is well-equipped to fulfill on both counts. However, it requires developers to bake such capabilities into their design strategies. As noted above, Apple gets it. When you think of the much-hyped Apple Business Chat, you understand that one of its big differentiators is end-to-end encryption. As Apple contemplates Business Chat’s future, it must also be thinking about integrating Siri, or a Siri-like conversational front end, to its chat services.

While it is a big “if”, it is clear that secure, conversational interfaces to popular online activities is within our planning cycles and that they can become the basis for highly convenient, frequently used search, shopping, entertainment and communications services. This is why Amazon Alexa is in pitched battle with Google Assistant and Apple’s Siri to garner share in the Voice-first marketplace. Research shows that people don’t mind advertising. They just don’t want it to be “creepy” or irrelevant. They’d also benefit from brands listening to their immediate input, rather than tracking them and imputing their intent.

[Image: originally from “Branding Strategy Insider”]

Categories: Intelligent Assistants, Articles