Doing Conversation Commerce Correctly

[Updated August 12]

In June of this year, a post by Chris Messina under the headline “The guy who coined the term ‘conversational commerce’ was wrong about conversational commerce” caught my attention. Operating under the belief that I, by convening the first Conversational Commerce Conference (C3) in 2011, and writing scores of advisories and white papers on “conversational access technologies” since the early 2000s, might be “that guy”, I was in a defensive posture as I reviewed his critique. I was relieved to learn that the headline was a self-reference and pleased to find the essay to be witty, insightful and thought-provoking.

Image: CGS Inc

In this age of Twitter-induced shortened attention spans, writing such a long post is risky. It is a leap to assume that anyone will want to absorb, or even finish, a post that takes more than five minutes to read. So what follows is my summary of what Chris has written:

He starts by explaining that he basically “nailed it” when he observed the migration of online marketing, support and commerce from passive, one-to-many social feeds and bulk emails to one-to-one links over messaging channels between two people or a person and a “bot.” In our research on deployments of Enterprise Intelligent Assistants, Opus Research has found the same to be true. Brands by the thousands have deployed some form of intelligent assistant, on a messaging platform to support individual efforts of self-service.

Next Chris predicts that, during a reasonable planning period, intelligent assistants and bots are going to be more human in nature. Indeed, as Opus Research continually updates the “Intelligent Assistants Landscape” we’ve observed that the ranks of companies introducing sentiment analysis and recognition of emotion continues to expand, and we expect chatbots and virtual agents to show what feels like empathy in handling customer queries and conversations.

What Went Wrong and What to do About It

Then the focus shifts to “where I went wrong,” and Chris initiates a deeper analysis of the core challenge to the self-identifying champions of conversational commerce:

“how to conduct ethically automated conversations that drive commercial outcomes effectively”

As was once said on TV, “We have the technology!” What we need to work on is a shared guiding principle or set of guidelines to define success, both for brands and individuals. At this point Chris proposes the term “Relationship Design” to define a new business discipline that is “about meaningful interactions, and how we create, observe, measure, edit, and improve the way conversational brands behave and relate to us in the era of the one-to-one, talking internet.”

It is a neat turn of phrase that, all at once, identifies the challenges ahead for companies that want to carry on meaningful, long-standing conversations with clients, customers and prospects consistently and at-scale over a broad spectrum of devices and modalities. It also introduces a job description for Relationship Designers. The high level description involves design and implementation of systems, services and processes that recognize an individual’s intent, in spite of imprecision in the way we express ourselves, and then accelerate the path to task fulfillment.

It’s Early, But Challenges Await for Enterprises

Elsewhere in the piece, Chris notes that it is still early in Conversational Commerce’s life-cycle or adoption curve. To this, I say, there is no better time to address both strategic and tactical impediments to adoption. As the sea of Individuals who are out-and-about with their heads down and eyes locked on smartphones attests, people are way ahead of enterprises in their personal paths to digitization. Enterprises are locked into existing platforms (aka silos) for live agents in contact centers (for both chat and voice), interactive voice response, “dot.com” (Web sites) and mobile apps.

The list of new digital channels is ever expanding, with the addition of Alexa skills, Google Actions and countless bots on messaging platforms. Each enables individuals to communicate with brands and enterprises using their own words, and they also create the requirement for an IA platform to ingest copious amounts of data and metadata surrounding the conversation in order to respond in the proper context. Opus Research has been counselingl corporate clients to take a platform approach to supporting the many challenges that arise when ‘going conversational. The endgame is to develop and maintain a “single source of truth” that provides correct answers or suggests best actions consistently and at-scale. By “at-scale” we mean that conversations can be carried out across a multiplicity of platforms – be it Facebook Messenger, Apple Business Chat, Amazon Alexa or Google Assistent – with the potential to reach billions of connected individuals.

At C3 San Francisco 2018 (#C3SF2018), speakers from USAA, Alight (a huge business process outsourcer that uses a virtual agent to help individuals plow through the process or enrolling for annual insurance coverage), Dell Computer, Autodesk, Esurance, and Chinese ecommerce giant VIPShop will share their experiences in firing up their customer care or digital marketing systems with conversational elements. With their help, we will gain insights on the new goals and metrics for what Chris calls Relationship Design and we at Opus Research call Intelligent Assistance.

A Practical Panel Discussion

I’m particularly excited to note that we kick off Day 2 of #C3SF2018 with a panel discussion that puts me on stage with Chris and Mitch Lieberman, director of Opus Research’s Conversational Intelligence Program. We frame the discussion as defining “A Higher Calling for Conversational Commerce and Brands.” Our intent is to surface and discuss the practical issues that arise as the enterprise innovators bringing conversational technologies into the digital marketing and customer care fabrics of their companies. Think of it as the context for grounding the presentations, panel discussions and case studies presented throughout the event.



Categories: Intelligent Assistants, Articles

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