![]() ![]() As these businesses add customers beyond what humans can handle, "bots will play an important role," says Feller.īots are a fancy way to describe automated messages. You can order an Uber on Messenger by tapping an address and requesting a ride, before a bot texts your driver's ETA. More than two dozen companies have begun using Facebook's Business on Messenger since it launched in March 2015, according to Frerk-Malte Feller, who runs the program for Facebook.Ĭlothing retailer Everlane has a couple of customer service agents chatting with as many as 200 customers each day about their shipments, using software from Zendesk. At a vending machine in Beijing you can scan a QR code with WeChat and pay for a milky Vitasoy drink with Weixin Pay.įacebook Messenger is also going down the humans-and-bots path. 22, 2016, Guangzhou, Beijing" on the China Southern Airlines WeChat account and you'll get a list of options you can tap and pay for. Want to order a flight from one Chinese city to another? Text "Jan. Go to the account for Beijing's Dian DouDe restaurant and you'll see a colorful Web page with prices and photos of steamed dumplings you can order from your table via the app. Many of WeChat's 10 million official accounts have a mixture of humans and bots. The big question for businesses: Who on their end is going to handle all this chatting? They can hire humans or train their existing customer service people to do it, but a new option is emerging: Go with robots. More official accounts are reportedly set up on WeChat each day than on traditional sites on the Web, a testament to China's leap toward a mobile-first or, more precisely, a messenger-first Internet. WeChat may have grossed as much as $3.8 billion last year, most of it from selling games and video ads on official accounts, but transaction fees will likely take up a bigger portion as more businesses sell goods and services through the app. In China millions of businesses already take payments and advertise through so-called official accounts on WeChat, or Weixin in Mandarin, the country's biggest messaging app, with 650 million active monthly users. So, instead of wasting thousands of dollars pushing an app on an unwilling public, businesses like Bauer Kitchen are taking their business to services such as Kik, Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp that their customers are already using to text. Most of us have all the apps we need and have narrowed our use down to a few messaging and social networking services. Americans have been downloading zero of them per month on average. The golden era of mobile apps is already over. Except now you don't even need a new app-you can just chat your way to a richer life. It felt a bit like the first time I tapped a button and an Uber car appeared three minutes later-the magic of what many in the tech industry call online-to-offline, the ability to order physical products or services from an app. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |