Good morning: Time for a chat?

Chatbots are now part of the toolkit for engaging with customers at scale.

Chat with MarTechBot

Good morning, Marketers, are you getting chatty?

With more and more customers “up for grabs,” as yesterday’s Daily Brief put it, are you relying on chat technology to engage them and retain their attention? And if you’re doing it at scale, are you using chatbots?

Chatbots have been with us for a while now but a lot of them still seem stuck in the primitive mode of referring you to a live agent if they’re automated dropdown list of replies doesn’t answer your question. The chatbot described in our story about STCHealth does indeed push customers through a guided workflow (or a dropdown list of replies as I like to call it). But powered by AI, it can at least refine the workflows as it gathers data.

Despite advances in natural language generation, it might be quite some time before we are dealing with a chatbot that’s indistinguishable from a human agent, because that’s a chatbot that would pass the Turing test, described over 70 years ago, and not yet truly passed.

Kim Davis

Editorial Director

Shorts

“It finally happened. In a conversation today someone was talking about ‘crypto’ and I assumed incorrectly, at first, they were talking about cryptocurrency as opposed to cryptography. I shall now hate myself for the rest of the day.” Phil Venables, CISO, Google Cloud


About the author

Kim Davis
Staff
Kim Davis is currently editor at large at MarTech. Born in London, but a New Yorker for almost three decades, Kim started covering enterprise software ten years ago. His experience encompasses SaaS for the enterprise, digital- ad data-driven urban planning, and applications of SaaS, digital technology, and data in the marketing space. He first wrote about marketing technology as editor of Haymarket’s The Hub, a dedicated marketing tech website, which subsequently became a channel on the established direct marketing brand DMN. Kim joined DMN proper in 2016, as a senior editor, becoming Executive Editor, then Editor-in-Chief a position he held until January 2020. Shortly thereafter he joined Third Door Media as Editorial Director at MarTech.

Kim was Associate Editor at a New York Times hyper-local news site, The Local: East Village, and has previously worked as an editor of an academic publication, and as a music journalist. He has written hundreds of New York restaurant reviews for a personal blog, and has been an occasional guest contributor to Eater.

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