And how can I assist you today, sir?

information and interact back through Facebook Messenger as well as Zendesk’s Zopim live chat.

During the Facebook Developer Conference Zendesk also showcased a chatbot for Facebook Messenger implemented within Spring, a digital shopping platform available on mobile and web. Spring is to-date the first business to begin blending automated messages from chatbots on the Facebook Messenger platform with human interactions powered by Zendesk, to enrich the overall customer experience journey and assist clients in shopping directly through Facebook Messenger.

A Zendesk announcement accompanying these presentations described how, “In building the [Facebook] Messenger integration into Zopim last year, we found consumer behaviour on messaging and live chat to be very different. Live chat is like talking to an attentive assistant in a store. It’s fantastic at the point of purchase because a session of quick-fire exchanges can result in a purchase, and the customer can leave the store. This is why live chat software is optimised for an agent to handle a handful of live conversations.

But messaging and its mobilefirst nature introduces a new paradigm. Messaging is perfect for multi-taskers. Customers fire off messages and move onto other tasks, knowing that they won’t miss the response. There is no ‘onhold’ anxiety to get an answer instantly. With messaging, we have found that an agent can be assigned many more conversations, and only a small percentage of those conversations will be live at any point.”

In a way, the emergence of chatbots does not only enhance application functionality, but also somewhat tampers the relationship between man and machine. A recent article in the Guardian newspaper described how a weather chatbot had “… its own pre-programmed, passive-aggressive personality. When you turn off its suggested function of sending you a chat with the day’s weather every morning at 7am, it replies: “Tired of me pinging you super useful info every morning? Well, fine! Just let me know when you miss me ;-).” In a world of seemingly growing social disconnect but social media connect, it’s seems it’s good to ‘ talk.’

Hadrian J Sammut is Head of Business Advisory Services with iMovo Limited. The company specialises in ‘Know Your Client’ assignments based on Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Zendesk, Salesforce as well as Qlikview and Tableau business intelligence tools. (hadrian.sammut@imovo.com.mt).