Last Sunday, I wanted to order a pizza. The bot offered me a few promo items, but otherwise, the whole exchange was quick, easy, and largely indistinguishable from a human interaction. Also, there’s a difference between talking to a human and a bot that technology may never be able to reconcile. The commerce of chatbots The term “chatterbox” was coined in 1994, the same year Pizza Hut filled its first online order. Conversable, the Austin-based company behind Pizza Hut’s chatbot technology, is turning the study of human behavior into a thriving business. And messaging apps, well suited for brand chatbots, have never been more popular. Calls for conversation For some companies, customer service is one long conversation. For others, the conversation ends with a pizza delivery. Messina showed the audience his own bot, an integrated messaging platform, and went over the evolution of the bot movement. Bots should have a similar type of disclosure statement.” That’s all well and good, but for the most part, the only rule I care about is if the bot can get my order right the next time I want a pizza.
Last Sunday, I wanted to order a pizza. I could’ve called my
local Pizza Hut or used the company’s website, but I decided to try
Facebook Messenger instead. I already had three conversations
going, so why not add one more chat window?
My customer account for Pizza Hut linked to Messenger in seconds
and didn’t require any new payment information. One large
pepperoni, please. Same as last time? Yes, please. But instead of
dealing with a stranger or another checkout screen, I was typing to
a chatbot instead. No small talk. No dropped calls. The bot offered
me a few promo items, but otherwise, the whole exchange was quick,
easy, and largely indistinguishable from a human interaction. Is
this still my address? Yep. The receipt came via email.
The company credited
with selling the first item on the internet
is now making the e-commerce even easier. Pizza Hut
recently announced its new chatbot ordering feature as part of
a massive social media rollout that debuted a few months ago.
Conversational commerce is hotter than a Samsung battery right now,
and the largest pizza chain in the world knows it,
following competitors and contemporaries alike into a space
still very much evolving.
But what if businesses are approaching chatbots all wrong?
What is the secret sauce?
Magnus Jern, president of mobile solutions company DMI, recently
told the
BBC that when chatbots try too hard to be natural, it diverts
from the purpose of conversational commerce. Jern helped launch
IKEA’s Anna chatbot in 2005, which was recently retired after 10
years. “In the beginning, we tried to impersonate a person, and we
found that there was no reason to do that,” he said.
But the move is a curious one, especially when chatbots are on
the rise. Earlier this year, KPCB’s Mary Meeker referred to them as
the “secret
sauce” of messaging in her keynote on digital trends.
However, academic research has suggested that consumers don’t
want robots that can talk like humans. Some would argue, instead,
that all we want is a smoother ordering process. A Harvard
Business Review report from 2010 found that “loyalty has a lot
more to do with how well companies deliver on their basic, even
plain-vanilla promises than on how dazzling the service experience
might be.
In his book, Influence, Dr. Robert Cialdini, a
professor who teaches psychology and marketing at Arizona State
University, concluded that we’re more motivated (to act, purchase,
click, etc.) when choice is limited.
Also, there’s a difference between talking to a human and a bot
that technology may never be able to reconcile. According to a
study published by
JAMA, conversational agents like Siri or Google Now simply
don’t understand the difference between “I’m dying” and “I’m dying
of hunger” in a crisis.
In other words, ordering a pizza via chat isn’t so unique
anymore, but predicting how that conversation might look in the
future is a bit more challenging.
The commerce of chatbots
The term “chatterbox” was coined in 1994, the same year Pizza
Hut filled its first online order. Today, the company is the
largest pizza chain in the world—with roughly half of its orders
coming through digital channels…
COMMENTS