The Invisible Interfaces Reshaping Customer Engagement

Business is becoming less about the transaction, with the relationship between customers and companies taking priority. As the digital transformation gathers pace, prices, and products are no longer influencing decisions. On the customer journey, experiences are now the new currency.

Mapping every customer touchpoint across a myriad of devices and platforms will prove crucial in delivering contextually relevant experiences. But with the rise of voice search and digital assistants such as Siri, Alexa, and our very own Amelia, we could soon be spending more time conversing with bots than humans.

Conversational experiences are already becoming the norm. Many businesses are already leveraging the art of conversation across messaging apps like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and Twitter. Whether it’s personalized upselling or the delivery of VIP-like support features, we expect the personal touch as standard.

Ensuring that your business is visible in a world dominated by voice searches will also quickly become a priority. When customers ask Alexa where they can locate a product or service, your site will disappear off their radar forever if it is not optimized for voice search.

One-way customer interactions belong in our analog past and have no room in a digital world. The reality facing all business leaders is that they must learn what their customers want by leveraging data across multiple channels, sources, and devices without being creepy.

The challenge is that many of us have almost unrealistic demands. Depending on the urgency of my request, I now expect a company to have almost mind-reader-like capabilities to deliver an always-online two-way engagement service. I expect a business to know my preferred channels and communicate with me on my terms seamlessly on whatever device that I pick up. These self-directed services are my expectation level, and these demands are becoming the norm.

Welcome to the consumer-empowered world where we can get anything we want, anywhere and at any time. For businesses, this also represents a tremendous opportunity to directly engage with customers in their living rooms, cars. or in the store. 

From having your badge scanned at a conference to entering your details on a website, AI-powered sales assistants are changing everything. Investing time getting to know consumers and directing them to where they can find who or what they are looking for at the right time, without being intrusive, is transforming the customer experience. 

However, the conversational technologies and interfaces that make it all possible are invisible, but this is a good thing. Technology should not act as a barrier between users and the real world; it should sit in the background while we carry out day-to-day activities, whether that be working or socializing.

Consumers don't need to know that their frictionless experience is made possible by a combination of AI, machine learning, and natural-language processing (NLP). If an online guide is required to get a user up and running, you have failed at stage one. 

User-experience design is adapting accordingly, and the way we are interacting with our devices has changed forever. These unseen interfaces are enabling us to finally go beyond the screen and replace pain points with intuitive user experiences.

Today, if you look around any room or public space, the chances are that you will see everyone face down, staring at their mobile device screen. But it's easy to see why. How much time do we waste unlocking our devices, searching for the right app, or navigating through menus?

However, it doesn't have to be like this, and maybe conversational interfaces can finally put a stop to our checking our phones 2,600 times a day. A brave new world with zero UI eliminates the need for a screen. 

Maybe we could communicate with machines using natural gestures such as our voice, facial recognition, and eventually our thoughts to interact with technology seamlessly in a non-intrusive way. It also opens up the web to users with visual impairments who will be able to access essential services without assistance.

There are many examples of early adopters of chatbots, but many are already considered primitive. Real-world deployments of this technology are only just getting started, but those that fail to keep up could quickly find that their business has been left behind.

As a global community, we are just beginning to comprehend the sheer scale of the digital transformation. Businesses, designers, and users will all need time to adapt accordingly. But those who learn quickly will seize the opportunities that invisible interfaces and seamless technology offer.