Customer Engagement with Chatbots and Collaboration Bots: Methods, Chances and Risks of the Use of Bots in Service and Marketing

Relevance and Potential of Bots for Customer

Obtaining information, flight check-ins or keeping a diary of one’s own

diet—all of this is possible in dialogue today. Customers can ask questions

via Messenger or WhatsApp or initiate processes. This service is comfortable

for the customer, available at all times via mobile and promises fast answers

or smooth problem-solving. A meanwhile strongly increasing number of companies is already relying on this means of contact and the figures on chat

usage speak in favour of this means supplementing or even replacing many

apps and web offers in the future. The reasons for this are manifold.

Figures of the online magazine Business Insider 1 reveal a clear develop-

ment away from the public post to the use of private messaging services such

as Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp. Facebook meanwhile has a user base

of around 1.7 billion people worldwide; 1.1 billion people use WhatsApp,

and Twitter can nevertheless still record 310 million users around the globe.

The platforms are growing fast, customers are accepting these platforms and

are using them exceedingly intensively. And even technology has long grown

out of the prototypes: IBM Watson won against a human being in the US

game show “Jeopardy” in as early as 2011—the handling of customer dialogues in contrast seems to be downright simple

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Robot Journalism Is Becoming Creative

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A Bluffer’s Guide to AI, Algorithmics and Big Data

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