3 Ways with...Chatbots

Conversational User Interfaces, or 'chatbots' if you're nasty, allow brands to directly communicate with customers without any of the tricky business of talking to them. Let us guide you through three strategies to use them in your latest campaign.

Think of chatbots, algorithms programmed to chat with people on messaging apps, and you probably think about one of the early-'00s MSN programs like Smarter Child who we all talked to in our weirdly lonely childhoods.

Since those early experiments, however, the technology has advanced, with chatbots able to automate many services usually relegated to groups of suffering interns. Services like:

1. Provide information about a product

Rather than bombard a consumer or user with extensive copy, using a chatbot allows the user-consumer to ask for only the information they want to know, making their interactions simpler and more beneficial for both sides.

BBDO Argentina had the most success with this approach as part of their Dialogue with an Artwork project for the Buenos Aires Museum of Modern Art. For this, gallery goers could talk to Emilio Renart's Bio Cosmos sculpture over Facebook chat, asking it how old it was, where it was made, and other questions that otherwise would have stayed on a sad, disregarded white plaque on the wall.

2. Create a world

Many ads manage to create a world around their brand, but it can be like this world is hidden behind glass, with consumers unable to enter into or interact with this world. Chatbots allow a brand to essentially give consumers a guided tour around a branded world, sometimes literally as with:

AKQA London's Terminal Tours for Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare. In the lead-up to the game's November release, the agency drew attention to the game's galaxy via GIFs and rendering of the various locations used in the game. Not only did this act as a great teaser for a hugely anticipated game, but it enforced the interactivity that for many people spending their evenings shouting obscenities into a headset was the game's best feature.

3. Expand the brand

Chatbots are regularly being used anywhere where the giving out of information can be automated, with the tech perfect for, for example, telling people information about their flights. From this basis, however, some brands have started to offer additional services that would have been too time-consuming to offer if a person had to do them.

Prime example of this is Code d'Azur's work with KLM. Users who send certain emojis to the airline's Facebook Messenger will receive reccomendations for the city they're in. Send the KLMBot a pizza emoji, for example, and it will send you Italian restaurant recommendations, or sending it the cash emoji will show you the closest ATM to your location.