The following is a guest contributed post from Elias Terman, VP of marketing at Distil Networks, a cybersecurity company specializing in bot detection and mitigation.

“Political elections around the world are influenced by them. Half of all internet traffic is made up of them. It’s time for marketers to realize that the technology that has the biggest impact on marketing is not some new cool app, or groundbreaking functionality from a vendor. It’s the effect of bots on their business.

Bots, at their core, are pieces of software that crawl the web and perform automated tasks at a volume and speed beyond human capability, and they hit every website in the world.

‘Good bots’ can deliver useful services for your website such as a virtual assistants (chat bots), search engine indexing and website performance monitoring. Marketers are also big consumers of bot-driven services that can help them improve search engine optimization (e.g. SEMRush and Moz), and ensure their pricing is competitive (e.g. Import.io and Upstream Commerce).

‘Bad bots,’ on the other hand, are used by hackers, fraudsters and cybercriminals to conduct a variety of harmful activities, including web scraping, click/ad fraud, account takeovers and data theft. On top of this, they can also have residual effects such as poor website performance (and therefore a poor customer experience) and skewed web analytics.

In fact, over 93 percent of websites were hit by bad bots that trigger marketing analytics trackers and performance measuring tools in 2016. This means that A/B tests could lead to choosing the wrong winner, skewed conversion rates could result in shifting budgets away from an effective strategy, and website engagement metrics could lead to focusing on optimizing the wrong content.

A new report on martech hiring trends revealed that data/analytics experts are expected to earn the top salaries in the industry. Considering this skill set has become so central to the marketing profession today, it’s more important than ever that marketers can trust the numbers they’re looking at.

For these reasons, bot technology – both good and bad – will have the biggest impact on marketing in 2018.”

The post Bots: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

The following is a guest contributed post from Beerud Sheth, Gupshup’s founder and CEO.

The post The Flow Bot Builder: An Uncompromising Approach to Bot Building appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

The following is a guest contributed post from James Ramey, CEO of DeviceBits.

Chatbots have been making a stronger appearance in more businesses today. If we go back a few years at the available technology we had, the idea of chatbots would have people wondering what exactly they were and how it can help their brand experience. Now, chatbots have begun to surround our everyday lives with daily used products to help people grab their modern cab (Uber), or send messages daily (WeChat). Chatbots have been developed into more refined pieces of technology, adding customer service to their job descriptions. They are answering a number of questions on products customers have purchased, because they have begun replacing live human agents in the customer support journey.

Seems like chatbots are becoming a popular tech entity for businesses to use and millions of consumers around the world are interacting with them more. However, what happens when businesses are not all too familiar with building chatbots correctly? This can lead to misrepresentations of what their capabilities are, and can affect how customers view them if they encounter them in the future.

As businesses begin building their chatbots, they should be aware of the issues and key steps in engineering a successful chatbot.

Overlooking Keys in a Successful Chatbot 

Chatbots, like any other technology, come with their challenges, and as more businesses are not correctly setting them up for success, their automation strategy begins to spiral downward. Around 21% of consumers polled do not interact with chatbots that appear, or if they do decide to interact with one, another 34% said they do so because they can’t find answers on their own.

Out of those polled, unfortunately 45% said chatbots do not provide the answers they need, and another 29% said they could only get answers from chatbots with simple and straightforward questions.

Chatbots are still trying to become favorable to consumers, but the conception of their improper engineering by businesses is holding consumers back from truly accepting them as a customer support tool. Another survey polling brand marketers in the U.S. acknowledges how brand marketers are not truly prioritizing chatbots into their strategies. 33% reveal that they do not have a chatbot, while 27% of other brand marketers said they do have a chatbot strategy but it still needs a lot of work to be successfully functional. 53% of these marketers also revealed that their bots were made to follow scripts, meaning they do not have any capabilities to learn from past customer data and interactions.

As different as any person is from one another, so are their questions on a product or service. Take the recent iPhone iOS 11 system upgrade and iPhone product launch, which drew in many issues and complex questions brought up by customers. New queries also require chatbots to “learn” over time the new products and issues brought on by the customers, and because of this, businesses need to re-engineer their chatbots to identify and understand new customer queries.

The update in technologies can be compared to the evolution of search engines. Today, Google is heavily used and is the primary source of research. Before Google, however, early search engines where not as accurate and did not provide as much relevant and specific information. As Google began stepping into the spotlight, their algorithms began to adapt customer queries and modifying itself to provide better information for each search.

Building A Better Bot

Chatbots run off past information, constantly updating with the help of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine-learning, creating helpful and downloadable self-support materials. As popular as self-support materials have become amongst consumers, there are still some businesses that have yet to implement these materials into their customer service strategies. As 82% of brand marketers follow this setback, they are also inhibiting chatbots from learning from customers.

Using A Chatbot

The effective use of chatbots results when the chatbot has been engineered correctly by businesses: assisting customers and cutting their time in self-research by communicating and interacting with their questions to provide the answers they are looking for. Chatbot technologies are changing how businesses are handling customer service. With the use of self-support materials and these bots, customers can effectively be led to the answers they need, and at the same time customers are helping these chatbots learn through predictive analytics in order to successfully handle future customer support journeys.

If businesses want to make the most out of their customer service, they need to create a customer support system that is intelligent enough to answer complex questions and analyze its past customer support experiences.

Editor’s Note: James Ramey is CEO of DeviceBits, a software company that services clients through a predictive and personalized understanding of interactive tutorials, adaptive FAQs, Interactive Guides, and Videos designed to for self-serving consumers. For more info visit www.devicebits.com.

The post OPINION: How Chatbots Are Being Built Incorrectly By Businesses Today appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

According to the findings of a latest report, a growing number of consumers are all about the bots.

3Cinteractive Corp (3C), a leading provider of mobile marketing services, on Tuesday unveiled its Chatbot Consumer Report, providing an in-depth look at how consumers interact with chatbots, and their preferences on using the technology when communicating with brands.

This insight proves valuable to brands that are developing or looking to develop a chatbot experience for their customers. Click here to download the complete report.

3C conducted the online chatbot survey and polled approximately 500 U.S. households*. The results showed that approximately 1/4 of consumers say they use chatbots on a daily basis (40% alone for Millennials). These numbers are important for brands as they consider the development of a chatbot, particularly since Business Insider reported earlier this year that 80% of businesses plan to have chatbots by the year 2020.

Despite the apparent consumer appetite for chatbots, there is still a long way to go for chatbots to truly make their mark on impacting businesses. When consumers were asked why they thought chatbots were not valuable, 71% said the chatbot could not answer their question or help them. As the technology advances, businesses will need to expand the capabilities of their chatbots to keep up with growing consumer expectation.

“Choosing the right chatbot strategy for your brand is critical, it’s not one size fits all,” said Margie Kupfer, VP of Marketing at 3Cinteractive. “Understand your customer preferences and build your chatbot strategy around one, specific function that benefits the customer. Starting small and executing your chatbot successfully ensures a positive brand experience and allows you to learn more about your customer in order to scale your chatbot into other business functions.”

To download the complete report, click here.

The post All About the Bots: 3Cinteractive Releases Chatbot Progress Report appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

“Starting in May of 2017, all of Advantage’s email conquest campaigns will be monitored by Orbee to ensure email conquest campaigns send the highest percentage of real human traffic interested in purchasing or servicing a car to a dealership’s website,” a provided statement reads.

Bot traffic and ad fraud cost digital advertisers $7.2B in 2016 and based on Orbee’s bot traffic report. 40% of paid digital advertising in the automotive industry consisted of bot traffic.

Additionally, we’re told that Orbee is also working to release a full-attribution machine learning algorithm that Advantage will utilize to track each individual shopper through their entire experience.

The post Advantage Taps Orbee to Improve Email Conquest Marketing for Automotive Marketers appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

This week, MMW learned that imperson is releasing of its enterprise platform, imperson.ai, “for creating, testing, deploying and managing conversational bots across Facebook Messenger, Skype, Kik, Slack, Twitter, Amazon Echo, SMS and more.”

What does it all mean exactly?

With Imperson.ai, brands and agencies can access a suite of professional tools for building conversational bots that have intent, relationship memory, personality, and natural learning capabilities.

According to the company, imperson’s conversational bots have engaged in promoting, qualifying and selling products and services to audiences.

The launch of imperson.ai will give digital agencies access to the most advanced technology for creating and managing multiple conversational bots with unique personalities and iniatitives.

“We see enormous potential in the fast-growing bot market,” said Erez Baum, co-founder and CEO of imperson. “The current bot experience is still very primitive, with menu-driven experiences that don’t allow brands to differentiate their voices from one another. The release of our new platform will enable creative people in brands and digital agencies to create richer and deeper bot experiences that can converse with consumers one-on-one to develop a more engaging relationship.”

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