The Chatbot Economy

Statistically speaking, chat has taken over apps in terms of time spend per time, stickiness and pervalence. During the early days of smartphone, users were more willing to try new apps. But with the abundance of apps, lack of novelty and differentiation, users are sticking to a few apps that are covering alot of features and usage scenarios.

For example, facebook is covering alot of news, content, chat, reviews etc.. which can easily replace alot of newspaper apps, review apps. Once in a while user would open some sports and health tracking apps, movies apps, but it lacks the same level of stickiness. Chat apps like Wechat, Line are putting more social features in the app, making it less of a need for facebook groups. In Taiwan, I know more people using Line Groups than creating another facebook group. People would use line group, because it is well integrated in the smartphone, and most people soley use the group on their smart phone.

So I guess people are seeing the trend, more users are putting their precious time in chat, while less business are in control of this channel. Chatbot is the perfect response to that, providing a scalable way for businesses to keep in touch with their customers. While a lot of tech pioneers and companies are envisioning bot as a way into chat, chat users might now see it that way. Chat is private, having conversations with friends, perhaps not even sharing thoughts publicly like in social network. People want to keep it that way. Sorry, no spam and robots. In fact, it is usually annoying to have spammers, tricksters, strangers trying to add you in chat, invading your privacy. Just because a lot of people are using chat, doesn’t mean business should invade this area. Most likely people will migrate to another channel if this happens. I believe whatsapp got it right. They want conversations to be simple, no ads, no bots. They rather have user pay to keep the app clean. We don’t feel whatsapp’s existence most of the time. But whenever we talk to friends, we use it.

Slackbot has a high degree of acceptance. It doesn’t feel out of place, or invasive. Slackbot is the first conversational agent when using slack. Its purpose is clear, and doesn’t pretend to be everything.The bot is the first thing people knew, so another bot wouldn’t be too weird. Its imaginable, others bots can be developed to fill what slackbot lacks. Slack is a workplace tools, and packs itself with commands which developers are familiar. It is targeting a quite tech savvy audience, with commands which can be extended through bots. It is a mingling between chat and the terminal.

Facebook messenger is less so. People see it as a person to person communication channel, with no commands, keywords to trigger additional bots or services. So when it is introduced, it is an awkward introduction. Are we talking to a bot or person?

While I see bot has its challenges, I don’t see chat completely lacking opportunities for businesses. Customer relationship channels can be implemented through popular chat platform. Instead of calling the call center, queueing in line, customer just chat with the company. There is no need of additional apps to be installed. While there may be security issues that I overlook, security challenges can be engineered.

There can be real person behind the chat, not necessarily bots all the time. I know a lot of small businesses add people to chat, and have one on one communications. It feels real and personal. There can be a systematic way to do this, instead of having to call each other and add people together.