It’s no secret that the rise of computer apps is transforming both the marketing and customer experience. One of the most intriguing developments in app development is in the area of chatbots that not only can send communications to customers but also respond “intelligently” to conversations.

Recently, I had the pleasure of speaking with Christian Brucculeri, the CEO at mobile messaging company Snaps, a developer of chatbots and other marketing technology products for companies. Brucculeri explained some of the background of how chatbots came to be, as well as their usefulness as a marketing tool.

“Typically chatbots represent a conversational interface between a consumer and a machine,” Brucculeri said. “They’re applications that have linguistic structure. It might allow you to ask a question and try to find an answer. They enable one-to-one communication between brands and consumers at scale, and they leverage technology in order to do that.”

Certainly chatbots have close technological relatives we’re already used to, like Apple’s Siri, Google Home and Amazon Alexa. You might call automated phone systems—the kind people love to hate—as a chatbot’s second cousin. But so far these are far from able to use artificial intelligence to understand language, and respond appropriately.

And while the technology can be used for entertainment purposes—think Snapchat or Facebook Messenger, for example—its greatest impact is potentially coming in marketing, Brucculeri told me.

Creating conversations, not messaging

“We work with brands across several industry verticals, including tourism, hospitality, entertainment, media, CPG, retail, quick-serve restaurants and more,” he said. “For example one apparel brand delivers a 30-day workout experience using basic Facebook Messenger. For some hospitality brands, they’re trying to manage their ongoing relationship with consumers and help them manage their rewards accounts.”

In many ways, this sounds similar to most apps we’re used to. So, what makes chatbots a different kind of app?

“Where chatbots get really interesting is in personalizing media and responses,” Brucculeri suggested. “Here, you can really do one-to-one marketing at scale.” Brucculeri said Snaps has developed such chatbots for sports teams, where a fan might receive notices of games, results and highlight videos. In the stadium, a chatbot might help a fan find restrooms and snack counters, based on physical location.

Brucculeri said Snaps is developing chatbots that function on a variety of existing platforms. Facebook Messenger, which launched a chatbot in 2016, may be most appropriate in accessing consumers, he said, but there’s also Kik, WeChat, Slack and many others, each of which may be experience-specific.

Chatbots also can be connected to customer relationship management platforms, such as Salesforce, to deliver notifications at the right time to the right person, Brucculeri said.

“We do CRM integration and user matching to log in and do account management,” he said. The result might enable companies to find new customers, engage with existing customers in a fun way, getting customers to take some form of action, or managing the relationship in other ways.

Improving the customer experience

Customer service, driven by artificial intelligence, also can be aided powerfully by such matching, Brucculeri said. Instead of hitting a bunch of digits to get routed to the right person, the artificial intelligence capabilities of chatbots—the two-way ability to listen and respond appropriately—can improve this experience immensely.

“A chatbot can do this in ways that are more convenient, simple, fast, and better for the customer and probably less expensive for the customer-service function,” he said.

The future of chatbots is an intriguing one, as technology evolves and as the bots themselves get “smarter” and more humanlike in their analyses and responses.

“We’re long on the idea that conversational interfaces will continue to evolve. Whether consumers are texting with or talking to them, automated systems like bots are almost certainly going to have a role in our future lives” Brucculeri said. “We see conversational media becoming the next wave and being potentially bigger than application media itself. I think in three years, people might be talking to bots more than they’re typing in bots.

“But the main idea remains the same,” he said. “Might I one day launch a chatbot on Alexa, Amazon’s voice control system? How about getting some type of visual element to go along with that, such as HoloLens, Microsoft’s holographic headset? Can these things become really rich experiences, far better than just staring at our phones and typing?

“I think some of the form factors are going to change, but I think the fundamental elements are going to be the same, which is conversational commerce. People increasingly will be talking to their computers, and they’re going to get a lot done by doing it.”

This week I moderated another Social Media Today webinar as part of their Best Thinker webinar series, this time on the topic of Social Listening: Harness Marketing Insights from Consumer Conversations. This webinar featured Kevin Hack (@kevinhack) head of Social Intelligence in Global Digital Marketing Advancement at The Hershey Company, Kendra Simpson (@Kfoley) Director of Communications at Kohler Company, Drew Neisser (@DrewNeisser) founder and CEO of Renegade and Will McInnes (@willmcinnes) Integrated Marketing Analyst at Union+Webster. This webinar was sponsored by Brandwatch. We discussed tips and tricks for finding and utilizing Social Listening in your organization!

Here are three key takeaways from the webinar:

1. Customer Centric? – How can you declare that you are customer centric if you don’t do Social Listening!
2. ROI of Social Listening – what’s the ROI of not listening to your customers – most likely it more than the cost of Social Listening
3. Social to predict what’s next – more and more social is being used to find opportunities in product development or innovation

To get a copy of the slides or to listen to the replay, please click here. You can also scan the highlights of this webinar on Twitter by reading the Storify below.

Our next webinar is titled Storytelling Gone Wild: The Key to Creating Viral Content be sure to sign up for it or view the schedule of other upcoming webinars here.

Recently I moderated another Social Media Today webinar as part of their Best Thinker webinar series, this time on the topic of Leading Companies for Customer Service, On and Off Social. This webinar featured Jason Kapler (@jasonkapler) Vice President of Marketing at LiveWorld, Dan Gingiss (@dgingiss) Head of Digital Customer Experience and Social for Discover Card and Kristina Libby (@KristinaLibby) Head of Consumer Communications at Microsoft. We discussed a ton of ideas on how customer services on and off of social need to scale.

Here are three key takeaways from the webinar:

1. Customer Service on Social needs to Scale – with all the tools out there is pretty easy to get started in customer service via social media the real trick is knowing how to scale a program to include a tool that can do routing and tracking so nothing gets lost in the shuffle.
2. Social customer service won’t fix a bad customer service program – while social customer service sounds great if your underlying program for customer service isn’t great – social won’t fix that. Focus on the core program and get that right before scaling to social media.
3. Reporting success of your customer service program – be sure to frame your results in a way that is meaningful to the business and not just focused on how you won over a unhappy client.

To get a copy of the slides or to listen to the replay, please click here. You can also scan the highlights of this webinar on Twitter by reading the Storify below.

Our next webinar is titled How Social Data Powers Customer Experience; be sure to sign up for it or view the schedule of other upcoming webinars here.

This week I moderated another Social Media Today webinar as part of their Best Thinker webinar series, this time on the topic of Social Customer Service is the New Heart of Marketing . This webinar was sponsored by Lithium and featured Dave Evans (@evansdave), the VP of Social Strategy at Lithium, Erna Alfred Liousas (@ErnaLiousas), an analyst serving B2C Marketing Professionals at Forrester Research, and Brien Hall (@BrienHall), Social Media Manager for Guest Services at AMC Theatres. We discussed why social media is becoming the primary channel for customer care.

Here are three of the key takeaways:

1. Become customer obsessed! – Forrester research predicts we are in the Age of the Customer and that in order to become customer obsessed you need to master 4 business imperatives: embracing the shift to mobile, turning big data into big insights, transforming your customer experience, and accelerating your digital transformation.
2. A majority of tweets to a brand go unanswered! – Its simple shocking since its proven that customer are more likely to buy when you respond that still companies don’t get it.
3. Social media to become the primary channel in 5 years for customer care  – We spent some time discussing the impacts on the call center, first call resolution and do we need to create separate channels just for customer care in social media.

To get a copy of the slides or to listen to the replay, please click here. You can also scan the highlights of this webinar on Twitter by reading the Storify below. Our next webinar is titled Is the Death of Social Greatly Exaggerated?; be sure to sign up for it or view the schedule of other upcoming webinars here.