Facebook’s recently launched chatbot technology could revolutionise customer service, online delivery and sales for retailers.

The birth of social media has created a seismic shift for retail brands and how they interact with their customers.

For years Facebook and Twitter have been used as a channel for publicly complaining about awful service (here’s looking at you, Great Western Railway); only now are we starting to see them used for commerce as well.

And, just as they come of age as a direct conversion channel, another technology has arrived poised to change everything – Facebook’s chatbot.

Chatbot is an application that lives inside Facebook Messenger. It relies on natural language processing, a technology that has only recently come of age, to understand any question a customer throws at it, and because it’s a bot it’s always there.

That enables totally friction-free customer service experiences. Customers currently feel satisfied if they get a response from a brand on Twitter within 10 minutes; chatbot will respond instantly, and it’ll give you a totally accurate answer every time.

Revolutionising retail

Chatbot will allow the automation of the vast majority of customer service enquiries. Need a returns envelope for your Asos order? A chatbot can generate that and send it to you.

Need to know how much it’ll cost to get an Uber to the gig across town? A chatbot can not only tell you, but also book it for you.

There’s clear potential for chatbots to revolutionise not just customer service but also retail sales in the next year or so.

You might be talking with a group of friends on Messenger, discussing what to buy for another friend’s birthday; you settle on a top from H&M, and a chatbot will understand you need help and offer to order it for you and deliver it to your house.

Or maybe you’ve seen a sofa you want to buy in John Lewis – mention that you’d like to order it in a Messenger chat with your partner, and a chatbot will do all the hard work for you.

At a stroke, retailer apps will be redundant – why would I open an app and navigate through a complicated interface when I can just get Messenger to do it all for me?

The reality of now

The technology still has some way to go, so anything involving discretion might be out of reach for now.

For example, you wouldn’t want to negotiate a price for your new car with a bot, because it’ll probably just give you approved answers, so you’d get a better deal from a human who will have a better understanding of your propensity to buy, your past experiences, and a whole range of other things that are hard for a machine to understand without specifically being told.

For now, retailers should research, test and explore the tool’s effectiveness to engage with a new generation of ‘always-on’ consumers.

The proliferation of chatbots will raise a whole host of new questions – what does a good user experience look like when there’s no user interface, just a messenger app? How do you differentiate your brand when the only tool you have is language? What happens when it goes wrong, as it inevitably sometimes will?

Of course, all these problems may have already been solved and you’ve been interacting with bots, unknowingly, for years – are you really sure that Gerry from John Lewis’ social media team is a real person? And, more to the point, would it matter if he wasn’t?

  • Robb Green is creative director at digital agency Rockpool