Almost half of brands are developing a more human chatbot experience. Are you?

What’s next for your chatbot strategy? If you want your chatbot to stand out from the crowd, you’ll need to know what your competitors are doing to create better customer experiences… So, we asked them.

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If “necessity is the mother of invention”, as the old proverb goes, competition must be the successful older sibling. Competition is someone, or something, that pushes you to do more than you otherwise would feel the need to.

Nike vs adidas, McDonalds vs Burger King, Marvel vs DC, and Pepsi vs Coca-Cola. In business, it’s hard to find a hugely successful brand without a hugely competitive rivalry pushing it forwards.

Today, four in every five brands compete on customer experience as their main competitive battleground, Gartner found. Things like price matter; but what matters more is how you make customers feel when you interact with them.

Which brings us on to your chatbot.

Making a competitive chatbot strategy

If you’ve read the UneeQ Blog before, you’ll know we don’t think chatbots are the final destination for exceptional digital customer experiences – but we love them nonetheless as a crucial step in creating a future-focused digital workforce.

We believe emerging digital human technology, powered by a chatbot, opens new opportunities to create more human experiences and conversations, instead of only functional but often rather utilitarian text-based interactions.

But this isn’t about what we think; it’s also about how other businesses – even your competitors – are planning to make their chatbots stand out from the crowd. So, we asked them, as part of our research for our latest eBook.

Brands want more “human” in the chatbot experience

Our research into chatbot strategies found that 42% of respondents say the next development priority for their chatbot is creating “a more human experience”.

Driven by user demand, they’re taking the speed and efficiency of their digital tools, but focusing on human connection. As customer experiences become more automated and technology-based, it’s telling that 82% of people say they want more human interaction with brands, not less.

In many ways, this demand has been a long time coming. From robo-call interactive voice response tools to conversational AI voice assistants like Siri, the user experience when interacting with technology has long been rather robotic. The novelty has worn off, and we want to speak face to face more. We want to be seen, heard and validated as part of a human connection.

Nothing beats a real person when doing this. But digital humans are now able to simulate some of the best parts of that human experience – showing emotion, listening, speaking and displaying warmth and empathy.

Other key chatbot development priorities are creating more in-depth conversations for their chatbots to have (32%), creating an omnichannel customer experience and presence (14%) and building out a better brand persona (12%).

It’s clear brands are thinking about improving the functional sides of their chatbots (the NLP and deployment) as well as the experience and embodiment.

Find out more in our free eBook

What metrics drive these brands’ digital human and chatbot strategies? How are chatbots primarily being used – for lead gen or customer support? And how do you differentiate responsibilities between your chatbot and human resources?

These are some of the questions we asked brands in our latest eBook – building a digital workforce.

Available for free, the eBook offers a solutions-based approach to humanizing the digital experience – not a technology-first approach – and also includes an in-depth Q&A with a leading brand doing this today.

Grab your free copy of the eBook below. We’d love to hear your thoughts.

About the research

We polled an audience of 328 chatbot leaders, employers and enthusiasts across the United States, Australia and New Zealand. Our eBook shows the results of three questions asked to these respondents:

• What is the next priority for the development of your organization’s chatbot?
• Which metric does your business consider most important when measuring the success of your chatbot strategy?
• Is your chatbot strategy primarily focused on: converting new customers, supporting existing ones, or both?

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