The Conversational Business: How Chatbots Will Reshape Digital Experiences

Chatbots? Really? Aren't they overhyped?

Sure, but that doesn't mean you should be ignoring them. Gartner predicts that by 2019, virtual personal assistants “will have changed the way users interact with devices and become universally accepted as part of everyday life.” That's less than two years away.

My new research report, "The Conversational Business: How Chatbots Will Reshape Digital Experiences", explores the risks and opportunities of conversational interfaces for enterprise. It identifies use cases, design principles, and strategic implications for digital transformation, brand experience and innovation, based on interviews with 24 business leaders, technology innovators and industry experts.

Here are a few tidbits:

• Conversational interfaces may be nascent now, but they will be transformative. Shifting the way we communicate with customers from rigid forms to more natural conversation has deep implications in the areas of brand strategy, revenue generation, innovation and customer experience.
• Their potential and momentum are real. Organizations such as MasterCard and BBC are piloting chatbots not only for customer experience, but for ecommerce, audience acquisition and other strategic goals.
• Yes, there are a lot of risks, but there's also a lot of upside. New tools, data issues, brand and customer experience all pose risks and offer opportunities for leaders who are willing to experiment and learn.
• Designing for conversation is a brand-new discipline. Using natural language (whether text or speech) is radically different from designing for Web or mobile app interactions. The report lays out a set of principles and tips for designing useful and natural conversational interfaces.

We're at the very beginning of our understanding of how to use conversational interfaces, and the one thing everyone I spoke with agreed is that there is just so much to learn. But (if you can remember that far) imagine you are back in 1996 and you've just seen your first commercial website. (If you can't remember that far back, check these out.) Now think about where we are today.

When it comes to conversational business, it's 1996, you're showing off your new Palm Pilot, Google just launched, and you can't get "The Macarena" out of your head.

You can download the report here.

As always, I love to hear your (on topic, please) thoughts, so feel free to ask questions and comment below.