Chat Is the Channel of Choice, For Now

Stewart also sees a strong future for the channel. “Chat will grow and become more common across various service sectors until it finds its place as part of the multichannel support mechanisms that most companies will employ,” he says. “Consumers will make a choice based on their need for speed and level of trust as to which channel they will leverage. A single consumer may elect to use different channels at different times based on convenience and need.”

Niemiec is more measured in her predictions, saying that in the short term live chat will continue to be popular for two key reasons: First, the technology will continue to improve, “making it a better, more effective support tool moving forward.” Second, there is still a wave of companies that have yet to invest in the technology, and it is likely already on their IT road maps.

However, she sees the increasing use of AI as a threat to the long-term popularity of live chat. “As AI improves in sophistication, more and more customer contacts may be addressed by this technology without requiring human contact. As this shift occurs, the number of interactions that will end up directly reaching an agent will decline, and live chat will accordingly begin to decline in importance,” she asserts.

Poggioli of West Monroe Partners offers a similar outlook. “What will likely drive implementation increases on the business side is the ability to automate those simple interactions so an agent is completely removed from the equation,” he says.

Meredith Flynn-Ripley, vice president of product messaging at Salesforce.com’s Service Cloud, says that while chat began “as the first digital real-time channel for desktop websites” and was “positioned as a replacement for phone calls,” it has “historically not lived up to its promise of becoming a dominant channel” due to its “synchronous communication model that, like a phone call, evaporates once the interaction ends.”

But, she goes on to say, chat has “evolved into asynchronous messaging,” combining real-time and non-real-time and allowing for conversation histories to be preserved so customers can see all of their past interactions the next time they reach out. “With messaging being asynchronous, customers and companies can choose to respond in real time or later depending on the situation. This next form of messaging enables an effortless, ongoing conversation between companies and customers that aligns with the way the majority of people communicate today,” Flynn-Ripley says.

This new world of messaging includes conversational SMS; Apple’s Business Chat on iOS devices; Rich Communication Services (RCS) messaging for Android devices; messaging apps such as Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and WeChat; and voice messaging via services such as Amazon Alexa and Google Home. “This category will continue to flourish now that chatbots are rapidly becoming available on all these digital channels, driving the adoption of messaging even faster,” she adds.

And it is in this context that companies can expect to continue facing significant design challenges. Philip Say, vice president of innovation product management at experience design agency Sutherland Labs, predicts that chatbot and customer experience (CX) developers will face daunting design challenges in 2019.

“As chatbots and digital assistants become increasingly advanced and humanlike, CX professionals will confront new challenges in designing applications that are both efficient and ethical, from creating experiences that are cool without being creepy, to prioritizing transparency so customers know they are speaking with a bot,” he predicts.

“Yet, in parallel, we will start to see more customers become savvy to the understanding that AI is part of life and adjust their expectations that these technologies will be included in many modern applications,” he continues.

Say also foresees “a broader convergence between the traditional support and CX roles,” which he says “will have to work in tandem in order to fully enhance the customer journey.”

Associate Editor Sam Del Rowe can be reached at sdelrowe@infotoday.com.