A glance at the Google Trends graph for 'Chatbot' gives you an idea of the massive growth over the last two years:
So what's behind the growth?
Let's take a look:
1. Explosive growth of messaging apps
The first reason is the explosive growth of messaging apps. The big four messaging apps (Facebook Messenger, WeChat, WhatsApp, Viber) have eclipsed the big four social media apps (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Linkedin) with 3 billion active users per month chatting away on these channels. Despite all the hype about social networks reigning supreme, the signs are that we prefer to chat in one-to-one or close knit groups (the success of SMS is testament to this).
2. Consumers expecting businesses to be contactable via chat
As we have seen, chat is fast becoming the preferred channel of communication for friends, families and social groups. The next obvious step is the ability to converse with businesses via chat too. For this reason, we’re seeing the growth in popularity of live chat. Live chat is where a customer chats with a support person via a web chat window on the company’s website in real time.
3. Being where your customers are
We’ve seen the rise in live chat, but from a consumer point of view why should I have to go to their website to live chat with them? Why can’t i just add the company as a contact in the messaging app I already use and ask them from there?
If I have an issue with my washing machine for example, why can’t I just message their customer support team through my messenger app, rather than phone or email them.
That’s exactly what forward thinking companies are experimenting with. One of the most successful examples of this ‘serve-your-customers-where-they-are’ mindset is Domino’s Anyware channels. They allow you to order a pizza via text or voice from virtually any app or device - even rather random channels like your smart TV or car!
4. Chatbots as a way to manage all those customer interactions
Company facebook pages are quite commonplace these days. In fact over 90 million businesses already have one. Like any Facebook profile, a company Facebook page comes with the ability to message it directly. This causes a major headache for those businesses that don't have someone in place to answer those questions.
And even for those companies that do have people in place, it’s not the best use of their time. As the popularity of messaging apps grows, it's becoming more and more critical for businesses to manage this channel.
This is where a chatbot can help. Instead of having a person on call to answer customer questions, a chatbot provides a human-like automated response mechanism for managing customer conversations at scale.
5. Customer interactions via messenger will get more complex
Above I mentioned the four big messaging apps. Did you notice WeChat? In the West we are relatively unaware of WeChat, but if you’re in China you sure know about them.
With close to a billion monthly users, WeChat are huge. China skipped the whole desktop thing and went mobile first - as a result, WeChat has been able to develop into something much bigger: a conversational commerce messaging app.
WeChat is so big that businesses in China don’t build websites first, they set up their WeChat account and start selling their wares through that. WeChat allows e-commerce and financial payments - something which no other western messaging app allowed you to do, until Facebook messenger recently introduced it.
6. Facebook’s play to be the next WeChat for the West
Facebook aim is clear. To make Facebook Messenger the WeChat of the West. That’s why they opened up Facebook Messengers API to bot developers last year. Since then, developer’s have been moving in droves to bot development (like the early days of apps) with 100,000 Facebook Messenger bots released already in 2017.
Summary
So we’ve learned that messaging apps are on a massive growth curve, bigger than social media apps, and that people are expecting companies to be on messenger apps.
As companies don’t (and won't) have the capacity to be manage multiple messaging app channels - but they need to be to stay competitive - they are (and will increasingly) turn to chatbots to manage their customer interactions.
Also check out this infographic that charts the rise of the chatbots (from a historical perspective):
Infographic source: Drift.com
