Global leaders in messaging, bots and conversational interfaces descended on Tel Aviv today for the third annual Chatbot Summit. IBM, Google, Oracle, LivePerson, Genesys, SAP, Amdocs, HP, Lenovo, Vonage, Deutsche Telekom and over 1,000 participants came together to share, discuss and debate the future of conversational computing.
Our Co-Founder and CTO, Mike Gozzo, delivered a keynote address on the future of messaging platforms. While it’s easy to get caught up in the latest technology advances, Mike reminded the audience that if conversational technology is to reach its potential, it won’t be about the bots, or the AI, or the voice interfaces, but rather will have to be about us, the people, the users of this technology.
The winning conversation platforms of the future will succeed not because of their raw (artificial) intelligence, but by intimately knowing their users and their context. Without context, all the AI in the world isn’t worth much when applied to customer engagement.
For the past 2+ years at Smooch we’ve been focused on working with customer engagement platforms to help humanize the relationships between businesses and their users, a mission we are passionate about. From helpdesks, live chat and social support, to CRM, call center and marketing platforms, Smooch is known for bringing the power of modern, persistent, omnichannel conversations to other software makers.
Quietly, we’ve also been working with bot platforms, developers and agencies like Oracle, Meya.ai, Pronavigator, Sciensio, Clare.ai and Commons, seeking to understand how we can best help these players humanize B2C interactions, even through automation.
That’s why we’re happy to announce today, from the Chatbot Summit, our brand new offering specifically designed to meet the needs of bot makers. Smooch for Bots enables bot companies to instantly deploy their bots wherever users are. Whether that’s on the most popular chat apps, mobile apps and web messengers or SMS. Smooch for Bots empowers bot makers to:
- Reach more customers by being wherever users are, regardless of channel;
- Leverage each messaging channel’s best native features to optimize the user experience;
- Orchestrate and integrate bot conversations with helpdesks, live chat, CRMs and other enterprise systems;
- Bring contextual awareness to every interaction with access to historical conversation records and user profile metadata.
Meya.ai, which powers bots for brands like Mercedes and Vodafone, had this to say about our platform:
“Smooch allows us to increase our messaging channel coverage with very little internal engineering resources. We’re happy because we can focus our efforts on our core competency. Our customers are happy because they can deploy their bots to the channels their customers prefer.” - Erik Kalviainen, CEO, Meya.ai
By leveraging every messaging channel’s best native features automatically, Smooch helps bot makers deliver a rich and interactive experience for users — no channel-specific code required. Rich message types like emojis, images, carousels, quick replies, postbacks and buttons to name a few, can be easily supported.
Integrating with Smooch allows bots to transfer the conversation to a human when it can’t handle an inquiry. Bots can seamlessly escalate inquiries to customer engagement platforms, passing on the critical information a live agent needs to take over the conversation.
Sciensio, best known for their market leading event bots, uses Smooch to deploy their bots to the world’s messaging channels and orchestrate conversations between bots and live agents:
“Smooch provides two key features that are critical to our business: multi-channel messaging and the ability to smoothly transition to live human support. Their technology, backed by an incredible team, has enabled us to focus on the features needed to be the first to market with our award-winning product.” - Chris Colleran, Chief Technology Officer, Sciensio
By giving your bots access to contextual data like conversation history and user metadata, Smooch helps your bots to be even smarter, allowing them to propose more personalized and effective recommendations to customers, and ultimately helping to humanize the relationship between businesses and their consumers.
That is a future we look forward to.
"In a world where customer experience is paramount, bots need to be wherever a brand's customers are, which is everywhere! As we dedicate our efforts to our own AI solution, Smooch’s enables us to deploy our solution faster and is a great conversation platform for our needs." - Liri Halperin Segal, CEO, LeO
