Consumer Centricity and Chatbots - Friends or Enemies
Stating a company is dedicated to serving its customers is commonplace.
Paying lipservice to this concept is equally frequent - things like efficiency drives, cost reduction programmes and the like get in the way.
The voice of the customer is perhaps heard, but then it gets drowned out.
The ongoing embrace of e-commerce and the use of Artifiical Intelligence in service-facing roles in particular is accelerating this trend.
Chat-bots are increasingly not just the first, they seem to be the only point of contact - and sadly they almost always can't answer your question.
Why raise this point for Market Research?
Seamless beats Bots
As research professionals, client or agencyside, we're constantly tasked with finding the best way to engage with various audiences - finding the right language, tonality, sorting out what elements of a website need tweaking, how to optimise a campaign.
All good.
But if key aspects of the "customer experience" - especially in customer facing roles - are driven more by inadequate AI, very often irritating chatbots, then the notion of "seamless" easily collapses.
Listen carefully to customers here at the Insights or Discovery phase - introduce a mock-bouncy robot Chat Bot at a later touchpoint. Not exactly a rounded approach - and one that destroys brand goodwill.
Human Touch
Humans are fallible, expensive - but very re-assuring. Imagine Wimbledon without the linespeople - just the Hawk-Eye Live System, showing you whether a ball was in or out.
To quote an article in a UK daily newspaper: if everything was done by robots, then "it might be more accurate but it kind of takes away that element of entertainment, of suspense. Tennis would be far poorer without line umpires.”
Quite.
So here's to a world where human connections are celebrated - across the marketing cycle and the breadth of touchpoints.
And to a world where the different type of value added by real humans (however imperfect) is acknowledged by those in charge of budgets and balance sheets.
Curious, as ever, as to others' views.