Messaging Chatbots are the New Organizational Interface
Lots of revolutions start off with shaky first steps that obscure the enormity of the changes they’re setting in motion. Messaging chatbots are the initial, shaky steps of a revolution in the way we relate to organizations through their products and services.
Messaging Chatbots, as New Communications Medium
Chatbot technology is going to have a huge impact on today’s messaging services. One of the most interesting applications of these “messaging chatbots” will be to create a powerful new medium for automating communications with organizations.
Some industry observers have taken to describing this new market as “conversational commerce” and while I think that’s a useful term, as I’ll explain later, I think it cuts off a large part of what’s really happening here. Messaging chatbots will transform the way we engage with organizations. In fact, they may even change the way we think about organizations.
Facebook Reveals Its Hand
There’s a lot happening in messaging chatbots today, including the recent announcements about Facebook’s Messenger service. The initial impressions have been mixed.
Yes, perhaps it’s a bit of a shaky start, but don’t let that distract you from the revolution now in motion.
Facebook hopes to use Messenger to extend its advertising relationship with businesses to into something akin to a communications gateway. With chatbots, the company hopes to make it easy for businesses to automate customer engagement — and not just engagement on Facebook but engagement in general.
Google, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft want pieces of this pie too. But with 900 million monthly users, Facebook has a decent chance of turning a chatbot-enabled Messenger into the new customer interface for engaging with organizations. It’s a massive opportunity that, if they pull it off, would absolutely dwarf their current revenues.
A New Organizational Interface
In the old days, the way one ‘interfaced’ with an organization was to walk into its place of business or maybe write a letter. Over time, that interface changed with the introduction of telephones, email, websites and social media. With each of these communication platforms, organizations attempted to automate their communications with tools like phone trees, email autoresponders, and interactive, personalized web design — sometimes to irritating effect for customers.
Interface: a common boundary or interconnection between systems, equipment, concepts, or human beings.
As organizations automate, more and more organizational communications will happen through machines. In terms of sheer volume, the bulk of these exchanges will actually be machines communicating with other machines through things like Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and standardized schema.
Conversation is how we humans communicate with each other. So in the cases where machines aren’t talking with one another, but instead with humans, those communications are likely to involve some descendent of today’s humble chatbots.
Some of these machine-to-human conversations will be external and some will be internal. Those internal conversations aren’t exactly “commerce” — which is why I believe “conversational commerce” is too limiting a term for what’s actually happening. I prefer “messaging chatbots” to describe this larger emerging market for automating organizational communications.
In the competition for internal messaging chatbots, the winner is still far from determined. Slack is doing a lot of interesting work. But Satya Nadella is turning Microsoft around and Office and Skype represent a powerful platform for workplace chatbots. I wouldn’t rule Salesforce out either.
When it comes to communicating with people outside the organization — let’s call this the “customer-facing messaging chatbot” — Facebook’s 900 million Messenger user base is looking increasingly like the winner.
For a long time I’d just assumed we would be building this kind of conversational automation into company websites. No doubt that will be an option, but it’s looking more likely that people will just contact organizations through the same messaging services we use for the rest of our lives. In this way, it’s going to be a lot like a phoning a company — perhaps minus “phone tree rage.”
One of the more subtle reasons customer-facing messaging chatbots are unlikely to sit within the organizations we’re engaging is the absence of standards for Internet Protocol (IP) messaging. Were we to have something like SMS (the Simple Messaging Service standard for cellular networks), any IP messaging client would be able to talk to any organizational chatbot — regardless of where it was. Without that standard, the customer-facing chatbot market is likely to converge on the one or two dominant proprietary solutions big enough to generate the increasing returns that certain types of communications networks create. I’ve little doubt at this point that Facebook will dominate this market; the question is whether Apple or Google can shift enough share to turn that monopoly into an oligopoly.
Chatting with the Internet of Things
Here’s another reason why these customer-facing messaging chatbots are important: they’re how we’ll talk to the Internet of Things.
The idea that, within a few years, we’ll be conversing with objects and devices via the Internet of Things isn’t anything new, but I think it’s important to understand how this transition is likely to unfold.
It’s not hard to see that when we talk with products and services while shopping at retail outlets in the future, what we’ll really be doing is conversing with the companies behind those offerings. That’s no less true once we bring these products and services into our homes. The underlying reality of our connections with our future cars, microwaves and laundry detergent is that we won’t actually be talking to a product or service. Those offerings are just avatars for working with manufacturers, retailers and service providers.
In other words, we will be conversing with these companies through their products and services.
What’s more, these future conversations with organizations over the Internet of Things will probably use some descendent of today’s customer-facing messaging chatbots. Let that sink in because it’s an important point: Facebook’s Messenger is likely to be the interface you will use to talk to your toaster.
Like my earlier assumption about talking with an organization through its website, I’d also assumed I would talk to my dishwasher through some built-in screen or microphone and speaker. Again, we will likely have that too; but it’s going to be far cheaper, far easier, and far more habitual to get my dishwasher’s attention by just mentioning it in Messenger.
Sometime soon, General Electric will build a customer support chatbot for Messenger to help me to solve problems I have with my dishwasher. Eventually, it will make sense to connect that chatbot with the data and intelligence embedded in that dishwasher. At that point, will I be talking to GE or to my dishwasher? The answer is both: I will be using a customer-facing messaging chatbot to talk to General Electric through a dishwasher avatar.
Organizational Relations
The big takeaway here is don’t let their shaky first steps obscure the enormity of the changes that messaging chatbots are already setting in motion. We are about to change the way that we communicate with organizations and these changes will ripple into the hundreds of daily interactions we have with the thousands of products and services in our lives.
Stepping back, one question that emerges is how these new, more conversational, modes of interacting with organizations will change the way we think about these entities. Brands already invest huge sums of money into building pseudo personas that define our relationship with a brand. What we’re talking about with the future of customer-facing messaging chatbots is taking that illusion one step further: personas that will feel increasingly like we’re interacting with some one, rather than some thing.
