Get smart, use chatbots and give your business a headstart

 

By MBUGUA NJIHIA

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Summary

• A chatbot is a service persona that can engage users via varied input mediums; text, audio and visual often guided towards a particular desired output.
• IM platforms happen to know a lot about your current and potential consumers.
• In the traditional telco world, you will get charged for every conversation or interaction you have with consumers whether through SMS credits, USSD hops or voice minutes.

We live in a conversation economy driven by an almost ubiquitous mobile data presence that has millions of consumers the world over interact at least once a day with online channels, mostly email and instant messaging.

Mobile value added services have been the best manifestation of the conversation economy over the past decade and a-half in most parts of Africa as mobile grew by leaps and bounds. The only challenge has been cost as it is not cheap to run sustained engagements or what I call the ‘‘always on connection’’.

In comes instant messaging on different platforms commanding varied market and mind share across different geographies globally.

Some remain closed while others have opened up, creating massive ecosystems that support a range of industries and verticals from commerce, money transfer, travel, entertainment, news, transport to logistics.
In Africa, it can be argued that Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp are the kings of the hill, with global numbers that would support the same with over one billion users each. 

A chatbot is a service persona that can engage users via varied input mediums; text, audio and visual often guided towards a particular desired output.

Its intelligence, smartness and cognitive abilities can be enhanced using additional services integrated into the backend. With millions of users engaged daily on instant messaging platforms, we should really be seeing more brands and businesses adopt chatbots to interact at scale if for only the following three reasons.

KNOW YOUR CUSTOMER

IM platforms happen to know a lot about your current and potential consumers. By plugging into their ad platforms for initial visibility, you can drive qualified users to your bot and mine additional meta-data from your social graph quite seamlessly, affording you the opportunity to meet your interaction KPI must faster.

Every interaction must end in a transaction and for most businesses, the transaction takes the monetary form. While most platforms have enabled credit card payments only, you can integrate mobile money wallets without breaking a sweat.

COST OF ENGAGEMENT

In the traditional telco world, you will get charged for every conversation or interaction you have with consumers whether through SMS credits, USSD hops or voice minutes.

If you integrate directly to the IM platforms these costs can be written off or greatly reduced, fattening the bottom-line on reduced capital expenditure. Get smart about using chatbots and test the waters for your business.