Hospitality

Chatbots are artificial intelligence systems that interact with users via messaging, text, or speech. As chatbot technology matures, the underlying AI technology continues to develop and grow more sophisticated. More than 100,000 chatbots have been developed for use on Facebook’s Messenger app, giving retailers unparalleled data about customers to help grow business in 2017.

Analysts predict big opportunities for chatbots, such as expansion to new mobile platforms, the emergence of chatbot markets, humanization, and more. Chatbots in retail are expected to boom in 2017 and beyond.

Chatbots will refine customer engagement. Chatbots personalize the customer experience by analyzing personal data, demographic information, buying behavior, and much more. Chatbots will help retailers to curate customer’s first impression of their brands. Chatbots also handle customer support by being present 24/7. In addition, bots are able to imitate conversations with real humans and build rapport with users.

Chatbots will help retailers track buying behavior. Chatbots are able to automatically record incoming data from users in the form of interactions, text messages, images, and voice message. And where there’s data, there’s analysis. Sentiment analysis creates multiple opportunities for capturing customers’ reactions, A/B testing, creating triggers that stimulate users to engage with bots, and more. Therefore, retailers will be able to generate content that’s relevant for a specific occasion, time, or a person that chatbots are programmed to recognize.

Chatbots will sense customers’ moods. To make chatbots empathetic, developers rely on natural language processing (NLP) technologies that analyze linguistic metrics including words, negations, sentence constructions, use of exclamation marks, and so on. Retailers are interested in empathetic chatbots because such bots can immediately react to customer requests. For example, when a chatbot recognizes a cheerful tone, it can generate relevant responses that will keep a conversation upbeat. On the other hand, a chatbot is able to catch on to a dissatisfied mood and provide an apology or redirect a customer to a human assistant. The ability to empathize will also help chatbots learn about suggestions and keywords that influence customers’ moods and will help marketing teams build better strategies for customer acquisition.

Chatbots will help retailers automate operations. Brands will adopt chatbot technologies to enhance ‘conversational ecommerce’ ‒ the concept of using bots to stimulate conversations with customers to push them to browse more and buy more goods. Therefore, a human workforce won’t be needed to convert people into customers. In the future, chatbots are predicted to expand their abilities, so they will act as ultimate helpers for customer support, order processing, in-store assistants, and promotions while also offering giveaways, seasonal trivia, and product scavenging.

With unprecedented progress with AI and machine learning technologies, and artificial intelligence driving business transformation, PCCW Solutions creates a customer service chatbot that is right for your business and platform. Our chatbots will reduce customer service resources in your business, opening new doors.

The idea of proximity, the physical location of a product with respect to the consumer, involves a new dimension previously untapped given the limits of technology until recent years. ‘Proximity marketing’ uses cellular technology to send marketing messages to mobile-device users who are in close vicinity to a business. Via a Wi-Fi or Bluetooth signal, proximity marketers can send content similar to a mobile application program (app) that appears automatically on the mobile devices of consumers.

Retailers are tapping the value as 53% of consumers are willing to share their current location to receive more relevant advertising. 57% of consumers are more likely to engage with location-based advertising. 62% of consumers share local deals with friends and 63% of consumers feel a coupon is the most valuable form of mobile marketing. Targeted offers based upon proximity leads to higher conversion rates, which is the ultimate goal for brands.

Proximity marketing has tremendous revenue-producing potential, enabling retailers to deepen connection with consumers, encourage more loyalty and greatly improve the customer experience. Importantly, all of these factors combine to make Proximity marketing a very effective tool to generate higher ROI for businesses and advertisers.

Location Based Services (LBS) is no longer a buzz phrase of marketing, as it’s set to grow to US$77.84 billion by 2020. PCCW Solutions jointly developed Geomagnetic Location-based solutions with Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. We use the earth’s geomagnetic fields to enable the compass of smartphones to precisely locate individuals within indoor spaces. The set up is easy, requires no hardware installation, and is compatible with both iOS & Android devices.

With Geomagnetic Location-based solutions, PCCW Solutions enables retailers to navigate its customers to the outlets they are searching and adopt proximity marketing to boost sales.