conversational commerce - symbioconversational commerce - dialog between a machine and a human opens...
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CONVERSATIONAL
COMMERCE
Conversational Commerce - dialog between a machine and a human opens up interesting business opportunities
Today machine learning enabled solutions are able to understand voice and interact with people. This opens up outstanding new possibilities in consumer environments and in the wider business world. In this eGuide, we will explain what Conversational Commerce is, how companies benefit from the opportunities it provides and how Symbio can help your company to develop your own services using voice recognition. Welcome towards the voice!
CONVERSATIONAL
COMMERCE
What is Conversational Commerce?
Conversational Commerce is an umbrella term referring to e-commerce solutions that are enabled by voice and able to carry out verbal communications with humans. Such solutions range from simple chatbots to complex virtual customer assistants.
In practice, the more sophisticated solutions are built on top of conversational platforms provided as cloud services. Such systems are able to recognize speech, to understand customer intents and to carry out conversations.
At the core of these conversational platforms are complex machine learning models. The capabilities of these models have developed in leaps and bounds in the recent years. User interfaces are now beginning to support interaction in a fashion that is already natural for us. Conversational solutions might also understand our context and the situation we are in, so that they are able to better guide the discussion and improve our experience as customers.
Designers of conversational user interfaces need to be able to construct dialogs that humans perceive as meaningful and matching to their expectations. This is no easy feat. It is essential that the user understands the role and the abilities of the system. Equally importantly, the developers need to be able to teach the system to recognize the expectations of the user. A mutual and uniform understanding is a prerequisite for a successful dialog.
How do companies benefit from Conversational Commerce?
Applications for understanding speech, for drawing conclusions and even for recognizing human moods are all feasible today. As a complementary communication channel, such applications can improve customer service, speed up information discovery and analysis and give end users ways to communicate that can be better suited to their situation. The main objective of Conversational Commerce should be to improve customer experience and increase the added value for the customer.
24-hour service and expanded customer data
Conversational applications can operate around the clock. They can infer attributes such as sex, age and dialect from the voice. They can identify situational factors such as location and time of day. They can remember prior interactions with customers, or with a particular customer, and learn from those.
Bringing together all such factors will help you to deliver seamless customer service and even to anticipate your customer’s needs. Conversational solutions can either augment the capabilities of customer service personnel or directly interact with the customer – or they can do both to further improve customer experience.
Anticipating and independent information search
In an industrial environment, machines are already anticipating needs for future maintenance operations or give notifications about inventory coverage. Thus, the initiator of the dialog is not always a person but machines can suggest solutions for future needs or warn about changes in the environment spontaneously. Such services for consumers can create truly delightful customer experiences.
Today a way to stand out, in the future a given
From a commercial point of view, Conversational Commerce is still very consumer-driven today. Studies and experience indicate that the target group is interested in using speech for searching information, for controlling household appliances, for booking services and for entertainment purposes.
Consumers are already familiar with voice assistants and devices such as Google Home or Amazon Echo. Such solutions respond to queries and requests addressed to them via a voice-controlled speaker. You can ask such devices to retrieve information, play music or control smart home appliances such as lights. The solutions are also able to recognize who is speaking with them.
At Consumer Electronics Show CES, held in Las Vegas in January 2018, one could see hundreds of smart networked speakers intended for home use. The trend of 2017 implies clear growth. In the third quarter, Amazon’s deliveries of Echo increased by 498 % compared with the previous year. Google Assistant app count more than doubled in just a few months.
As conversational solutions are becoming more widespread in consumer services, the pressure for their use grows also in the business-to-business sector. For companies, such services will become a way to stand out. To be that company that is easy to do business with.
Conversational solutions coupled with strong analytics capabilities can help reduce costs while still improving customer experience in B2B context. Such solutions will also enrich the days of the employees.
World-class conversational applications from Symbio
Together with our partner IBM we offer our customers unprecedented opportunities for developing completely new conversational services and solutions for the enterprise. We can build such applications on top of IBM Watson platform and a host of other technologies.
IBM Watson provides a comprehensive set of developer friendly building blocks that allows for rapid development of sophisticated conversational applications. Some of these building blocks are readymade components you can just plug in. Many offer possibilities for training and customization to recognize the behaviour and goals of your customers (or employees, suppliers etc.) in a way that is meaningful for you.
Text to speech application renders text to speech.
In other words, generating natural-sounding speech
from text input.
Speech to text transcribes audio input to text form.
Tone analyzer can interpret emotional states and tones of
voice from text input – for example from voice first
converted to text, or perhaps from tweets or product reviews.
Natural language classifiers can understand
intents or behaviors. A classifier learns from example data and can understand inputs that were not part of the
training set.
Assistant for structuring the whole dialog, including
customers intents i.e. anticipated user goals and the entities present in the expected conversations.
CONVERSATIONAL
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Symbio’s productization service enables quick access to market
Do you want to upgrade your company to the next level by providing a service exploiting speech recognition? Are you looking forward to serving your customers better by adding smart conversational applications to customer support? Would your existing offering or staff benefit from voice enabled services or devices?
Symbio’s productization service is a quick comprehensive service that is based on the needs of the customer. We create concepts, prototypes and products ready for global markets or industrial use. We use Design Thinking to get the idea right, Lean Start-up to get to a minimum viable product and Continuous Delivery to keep ahead of the competition – all the time focusing on the needs of the end user. Define it, Nail it, Scale it!
DEFINE IT
NAIL IT
SCALE IT
DESIGNTHINKING
LEANSTART-UP
CONTINUOUS DELIVERY
DEVOPS
AGILE
OPPORTUNITY/CHALLENGE
BUT NOSULITION
VALIDATEDPROTOTYPE
WITH MINIMALRISK
MINIMUMVIABLE
PRODUCT
GO TO MARKET
SHIPPABLEPRODUCT
DA
YS
WEEK
S
MO
NTH
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Symbio is the right partner for you if you want to learn more about Conversational Commerce and the unlimited range of applications. You will have at your service our world-class, international team and our partner network all specialized in new digital services and strategies.
Further information [email protected]
