Yesterday the American Express Black personal concierge service, tomorrow Siri, M and Cortana.
There’s been a lot of talk about the moves by Apple, Facebook and Google to enhance their “digital assistant” services’ AI and capabilities. In the latest news, Facebook is testing its M AI (a part of its Messenger app) with the aid of a team of humans, who currently are doing much of the back-end work to meet user requests as they train the AI and find out what capabilities their users actually want. If you’re a beta tester, you can use Facebook Messenger (through M) to make a reservation at a restaurant, order flowers, plan a route, and other such tasks through the chat app, just like a concierge service might do.
Facebook Messenger with M is part of a broader trend that’s been developing for years – the proliferation of “walled garden” social platforms that want users to spend a greater and greater amount of time on their site or app or consuming content mediated or accessed through that site or app.
Making that happen means removing reasons for people to leave the network or app to access other services or get information. Thus, Uber for Messenger (order a car right from the app, just as if you were texting). Users’ conversations and social interactions will move closer to being seamlessly and naturally and integrated with their brand interactions.
A better Ask Jeeves or a digital American Express Black?
The challenge with all these digital assistants will be scalability. Facebook’s M still only serves a small audience because many requests cannot yet be effectively answered by the algorithm.
For example, some beta testers used the app to get M to cancel their internet service for them by calling their provider. The app couldn’t call the provider itself, so a human had to do that. That’s the kind of service that you could get from a concierge service, but we’re a long way from having an algorithm that can actually perform such tasks. So the progress of these services will depend on other providers making their services similarly electronic and integrated – if it can’t be done online, a digital assistant will have trouble with it.
But let’s talk about what can be done with messaging and with digital assistants in the consumer realm – one of the more straightforward use cases, since e-commerce and online research are both already so well integrated into consumers’ lives. Some considerations include:
Algorithm-aligned SEO
“SEO” that’s adapted to the method each app will use to find the answer for you. If users are getting fully automated answers, this means understanding the methods Facebook, Apple and Google’s virtual assistants are using to answer these questions and ensuring that your relevant content shows up in those contexts.
In many cases, this may integrate with existing search engines – but the results will be mediated by this additional automated layer. If they’re tapping Yelp for reviews, your brand should be on Yelp and positioned effectively. Or, since Siri initially used Bing, it might mean optimizing for mobile on Bing in particular.
Not only that, but your content will need to be in a format that enables the assistant to respond in a useful and attributable manner either in a plain text response (“The best Italian Restaurant is <your brand>”) or by linking to your mobile-friendly, quickly loading and relevant site.
Integrated offerings
Where possible, partnering with social networks like WeChat or Facebook to gain added functionality can enable a custom experience for your brand. For example, a customer could text their local department store to ask about their men’s jeans, provide their size, and get a text back with images and integrated tap-to-buy buttons to make the process easy.
Conversational marketing
Taking a step back from the “digital assistant” format to the messaging apps they live within, it seems equally clear that conversation-based marketing and sales through these apps is going to become more prominent as people spend more time there and want to interact with brands more seamlessly.
The growth of conversation-based interactions as a primary way to learn about products will mean an additional blurring of the lines between content marketing, customer support and sales. As customers learn to expect that they can send a text for information or to order products, companies will have to be prepared to have conversations with their customers that feel natural and to provide support through similar methods.
These conversations will build on top of your existing content. It’s no longer enough to generate great static content that sits on your website, or even great “push” social posts. If the resources are available to make it possible, direct customer interactions will only grow in relevance.
Will digital assistants take over?
We’re still in the early stages. But there’s certainly untapped potential.
Image used under a CC-0 license from https://www.pexels.com/photo/hands-coffee-smartphone-technology-4831/.