5 Jan 2018
When was the last time you made a cold call for your business? Don’t remember? Of course, it is an irrelevant question when we are heading toward 2018. Who does depend on cold calls when technology is showering us with a variety of other techniques to connect with people and canvas them? Branding largely depends on marketing.
The word “canvassing” seems too outdated for the year 2018. It is time to replace this with “connecting.” What we are doing is connecting with our people over the web. The internet has bridged all gaps and connected us with people across the globe. Websites were developed, which were static initially and provided least number of functionalities. Later on, developers and designers found ideas to provide dynamicity across the websites, which would facilitate people with services at just a mouse click.
Then, the smart technology evolved and thus, every other service reached at our fingertips. Scrolling through sites, making a purchase order, chatting with people and so on was never as easy as this. And, now finally predicting what people want and providing flexibility accordingly. This brings us to our topic – artificial intelligence (AI).
So, now we have a variety of business promotion tactics that take us directly to our people in the crowd over the web. Brand symbols are playing an important role in connecting people with businesses. Many of the brands, including Apple has implemented this formulae. This tactic as others refer to as brand anthropomorphism is being revolutionized and are evolving in the form of latest AI technologies.
Some of the examples are the chatbots, such as Cortana from Microsoft, Siri from Apple and Alexa from Amazon, and so on. The conversation pattern that has been programmed into these interfaces are intuitively smart as they have been successful at attracting customers, who prefer to spend more time across these AIs that are rarely interesting. It is likely that with time these AIs would actually start dominating the real world, bridging the gaps between real and virtually parallel worlds.
This could bring about a variety of consequences. Such as the need for expert resources to manage these AIs, which will be used by people worldwide, owing to the large demand for these. Also, the people handling these AIs are required to be experts at ensuring that the brand’s message, and its goals and vision reach to the people. Another point that they should be careful is that if AI is not handled appropriately, it can lead to brand disintermediation. As well as businesses must be proactive at identifying any potential threats in the form of ethical or legal aspects when dealing with AI.
A study conducted by various researchers and analyzers by surveying more than 1,000 companies across the globe bring us to a point, where almost all these organizations have been already implementing AI or at least have started to do test trials with AI to find the level of brand performance through the various business processes. The services that were tested comprise marketing, sales, customer service, and even the external non-customer experiences. The results are variable and interesting, while it provides an insight into what are the factors that business decisions revolved around.
Chatbot is one of the words that we have been hearing for some time now. This kind of an AI technique helps in establishing and renovating your brand and giving it a fresher face. It comes with a reservoir of intelligence along with form facts, such as voices, physical boxes, text, screens and much more. The Amelia from IPsoft is one such example that appears on the user’s device as a connectivity point or person from the augmented world. In the very near future, we might see the hologram technology being incorporated with these to ensure that it is real and lively. Very soon, we will be encountering robots that exhibit human characteristics. Also, they would be empowered with features that are capable of responding and identifying facial expressions as well as natural language processing (NLP) techniques, which will be soon working at the front desks of companies.
Regardless of the form that this will transform into, companies are expected to skilfully deal with the future shifts or expectations, while interacting with customers. Once the AI starts representing your brand, your customer would start evaluating the brand and performance parameters on the basis of AI functionalities. Just like the cold calling can bring about the closing of a lead or a customer walking away from the brand forever, AI will now help the customers in forming an opinion about your brand. Also, the reach that AI is capable of building is unspeakable. If a single sales person is capable of reaching out to one person, your AI would reach out to more than 10s and 1000s of people out there. To be precise, we are heading toward global interactions and whatever impression your AI creates will reflect in your brand’s reputation and identity across the globe.