Why more resellers are turning to chatbots

With end users now less receptive to outbound marketing, do chatbots offer a new method of engaging prospects? Marian McHugh talks to several resellers that are rolling out the new technology on their websites

The advent of GDPR has led to marketing and sales departments having to become more creative in their efforts to win over new customers. Chatbot technology is increasingly becoming regarded as a necessary part of a reseller's business. Insight, for example, regularly uses chatbots in its North American business, and is rolling the technology out to its EMEA arm soon.

Paul Sweeney, head of marketing at Lan3, says that the Oxford-based MSP utilised the technology into its business about a year ago as a way to meet new customers in a place where the customer is "comfortable".

"I think most businesses have realised that the traditional ways of marketing and selling to end users have become increasingly difficult. People don't really answer the phone anymore and aren't particularly receptive to outbound messaging and marketing.

"[I've read] some research online that said 90 per cent of the buyer's journey is now done online. If that research is being done online then I think all organisations need to look at how they can interact with buyers where they ae doing all their research online.

Sweeney (pictured left) says that of Lan3's two primary routes to market, chatbots form a "big part" of incoming leads. He claims that people in general are "switching off" more and more from traditional advertising activities like emails or cold-calling and that the MSP has to meet its buyers in a way that is comfortable to them.

"The power in the buying process has shifted away from the seller to the buyer, they hold all the power now so we need to meet them where they're comfortable having a chat. Which is typically online," said Sweeney.

Although chatbots are generally thought of in relation to consumer-facing facing industries such as retail, more and more B2B businesses are employing it. MSP Amicus ITS is currently "dipping its toes" into the potential of the technology, according to its marketing manager Lindsay Burden. She said that in her experience and those of the executives attending conferences and in conversations, that there was a definite move towards incorporating chatbots into businesses.

The MSP's bot, "Ami", is being developed to sit on the front-end of the website and deal with general inquiries and direct the user to the appropriate department in the company. Burden doesn't believe it is a "must-have" just yet but that it is an experiment that could yield future fruit.

"[Chatbots are] incredibly successful in the retail business and highly deliverable there, but from the services perspective, it's a highly technical project, because you have got to be clearer and map much more carefully what you're trying to provide for the service, i.e. what exactly it is supposed to do for the business.

"It's not an absolute must but it is part of our curiosity of technology and part of that mandate to keep abreast with change."

Chris Dunning, founder of MSP Tech Quarters, says that his company has begun the process of implementing AI to assist its helpdesk, by providing short video clips to help resolve issues they may encounter.

He says that the technology has been designed to react to four different personality types, using vernacular corresponding to each type. "It's all designed so it's easy to use. Depending on the type of user that it is interfacing with, it will respond with different vernacular. For example, if it's talking to a technical person, it cuts to the chase, or if it is talking to a salesperson, it might be more gregarious," he explained.

Although Tech Quarters chatbot "Cosmo" is currently being used internally, Dunning does not rule out the possibility of rolling it out into other markets.

"There are different markets that we could sell this technology into. For example, if you're working at a helpdesk here and you're an apprentice or first-liner and you want to know how to do a certain thing and an error comes up, you can literally type into Cosmo and it will go ‘Watch this ten second video'. It gets team of engineers up to speed on tech really quickly.

"If that dictates that you've got that firstline workforce that can support that, then it's not a big leap to think of how many helpdesks out there - including our own - that need quick and easy training on something."

Dunning, who also founded training service 365 Cloud Academy, believes that this technology will increasingly become part of day-to-day business, but that it as much a cultural change as a technological one for organisations.

"Digital transformation is a fantastic word, but what does it mean? [Companies] have to embrace the technology. And that's a cultural change as much as it is a technology change. Culturally, people want to see a return on their investment and that means their bosses might be saying they want [IT engineers] to adopt this new technology and the engineer might blow it off. But if they have something to hand that gives them that ten second version training on videos and really makes them more productive with the technology that's rolled out.

"People's attention spans mean they don't want to be hanging around and want to learn quickly. What we want to do is take over the way people get trained. I firmly believe that just-in-time training [learning as you go] is the way forward."

I, Robot
As chatbot technology gains momentum in channel businesses, it is important to make it as human as possible, so that end users feel as satisfied with their interactions with the artificial intelligence as they would with a human being. Stuart Dorman, CIO at Sabio, that conversational flow is "key" to successful implementation of chatbots.

"Almost regardless of what technical platform you use - and there isn't a huge amount between them from what we've seen - it's about how you construct a conversation, the nuances of the way you ask a question and phrase things and how you respond. That's key to these type of applications being successful," he said.

Sabio develops chatbot technology for B2C websites, where it answers questions, defelcts calls from contact centres and carries out basic tasks and processes. Dorman believes that understanding human phrasings and the "art of conversation" is instrumental in its success.

However, Dorman (pictured left) warns against confusing chatbots with virtual embedded assistants (VEA).

"We're focused on trying to make sure that a much broader set of customers can have meaningful interactions with VEA across the much broader set of questions and capabilities and processes.

"For me, that's the difference between a chatbot - which is focused on a very singular task - versus a VEA- which is a much broader set of capabilities that works across a broader set of platforms s across the web, and is capable of having much richer conversations across those platforms.

Burden believes that it is important to be "transparent" with end users interacting with chatbots that they are dealing with a robot and not an actual person. "Everything we've learned from our research and feedback is very clear - it's a robot, not a person," she said, adding that it is important for service providers to have as many options open for users to communicate with them.

"Technology should be there as a welcome assistant but shouldn't at any point put a barrier in the way of the user. I think there are a lot of companies that are doing the adoption and pushing it down where that is the only route in.

"I always think you want to keep lots of options in your toolkit for users. If you're an MSP, service is your industry and you have to be flexible and agile to respond to needs of users. This is just an example of where I think there is a trend…but not to the exclusion of humanity in customer service and assisting user inquiries in all capacities."

Dorman says that Sabio's customers have seen "immediate benefits" to implementing chatbot technology early and believes that this technology will become incorporated wholesale into business structures.

"All of the implementations that we have put on so far, the customers have seen immediate benefits, within weeks of them going live. I look it as taking on someone new into your organisation. For the first month or so they'll probably be able to do a few things, but need to be coached and trained in order to be more productive and fully understand the language that customers use.

"If you look forward to the next three to five years, I see most interactions with organisations being fronted by AI to some extent, whether it be though an app, through a website or through a voice call. I think it will personalise the experience to users being driven by this conversational tech right at the front of the customer journey."