In
today’s world of instantaneous internet communication, it is faster and easier
than ever to get a message out to consumers. Consumers have an unprecedented
opportunity available to get their opinions and thoughts about a company heard
by that company’s employees and leadership. Now that it’s easier on both sides
to communicate, the question becomes how can the company keep up? As your
company starts to reach a steadily wider audience of consumers soon your
ability to respond to messages will be outpaced by the number of consumers
sending messages in. Do you just hire more and more people to handle responding
to these messages or do you just ignore them? Do you retain a small team of
people to respond to the messages but only ever reply by prewritten messages
that have no real relevance to the consumers comment? That would save a lot of
time so you could keep your team small. With the progression of new technology
I think there is a different option.
Who
has not heard of predictive texting? Almost all smart phones available today
have some form of predictive text. This is where the smart phone will give you
a few options of what it has predicted you are intending to say. It does this
by having a database of words and phrases that are often used in conjunction. I
just typed into my pre-installed smart phone keyboard the word “how” and one of
the options it predicted I might like to use was “are.” I selected “are” from a
list of 3 words and it then predicted that I might want to use the word “you”
next. “How are you?” Now this is incredibly simple predictions. There is a
digital keyboard company called Swiftkey that sells a digital keyboard for your
phone that will replace the pre-installed digital keyboard. Swiftkey’s keyboard
asks you if it can access your social media posts to learn words and phrases
that you often use. I’ve used this keyboard and it would successfully predict
some of the most interesting words that are very specific to how I type. It did
this seeing that I had used these words and phrases often in other forums and
predicted them when I was typing text messages.
I would
sometimes pull a prank on people I associate with by typing a text message that
was one hundred percent predictions from the phone. These texts would always be
funny because they were so close to making some kind of sense but they were
just outside of the coherent range. Swiftkey and Intel worked together to make
a technology for Stephen Hawking that will help him write faster by learning
how he likes to talk and predicting the words it thinks he would like to use
next. As this technology progresses it will be useful in more and more
situations.
Imagine
if a technology like this started to predict fully developed responses as it is
receiving communication. What if you set your phone to auto-respond to text
messages? Maybe someone texts you asking how your day has been, and the
auto-respond app looks up what you had scheduled that day and responds, “I’m
doing good, but I’m really busy. I have a lot of things going on today and it’s
pretty hectic.” As this technology progresses perhaps you could implement it to
respond to your consumers in a more personal way.
That’s a funny thought that a
message might feel more personal coming from a computer instead of a person.
If you have too many messages sent
in from consumers and you can’t respond to them, likely you’re just going to
send out a generic message that doesn’t take into account anything the person
said. Maybe you’ll send them a few coupons to try and make them feel special.
If this Swiftkey and Intel idea gets furthered you could have a computer read
the message and respond in a very specific and appropriate way. If you set the
computer to wait a few minutes before sending the response it would even feel like
the concern or comment the consumer had was important and was being addressed
quickly but thoughtfully. It would be infinitely cheaper than paying humans to
do the work. Just have a few people monitoring the messages it’s going to send
out and you have an inexpensive and effective way to respond to consumers that
feels personal. The opportunities for changes in communication through
technology are astounding.
