An estimated 1.8 billion people are expected to use digital assistants by 2021, vastly altering how your customers learn about, experience, and purchase your products.
On Wednesday, April 10, we hosted the Age of Digital Assistants event at Spark East. Our panelists included:
- Mike Lorenc, Head of Industry Live Events and Sports, Google
- Ansgar Strother, CEO, Movatic
- Martin Smith, CEO, Overflow Marketing Solutions
Our event was moderated by Bud Gibson, Professor of Marketing at Eastern Michigan University. Bud is the Director of CDE and a mentor during our Summer Clinic Internship.
A digital assistant or virtual assistant is a software agent that is designed to assist a user by answering questions and performing basic tasks.
The difference between assistant and assistance:
Mike Lorence explained that an assistant is a Google Home or Amazon Alexa. This is where a voice activation or input is needed. Assistance is making digital interactions with brands, products and services as seamless as possible. “If you book a flight with Delta and you receive a confirmation on your gmail account, magically your google assistant will tell let you know that you have a flight today at 4 pm and with traffic you should leave home 30 minutes early”. You don’t ask as a consumer but AI technology is able to combine multiple inputs to provide assistance to your life.
Using chatbots:
Martin Smith use “ManyChat” to create a Facebook Messenger bot for marketing, sales and support because Facebook is where Overflow Marketing Solutions receives high volume of conversations. Chatbots can be added to apps, websites, messaging platforms and more!
For Movatic, Ansgar Strother shared that chatbots can quickly redirect their users if there is an issue or something is not working. This helps your clients become satisfied when you can not be there physically or having someone on standby.
Chatbots saves people time and energy when looking for answers.
Tips to help your brand:
- Keep up with new laws in data privacy.
- Add a search bar into your site, it can collect a lot of specific data.
- Leverage existing platforms, especially if you are a small business without all the computer skills.
Tools to help your brand:
- Dialogflow: connects with users on your website, mobile app, the Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa, Facebook Messenger, ect., to interact with your product by building engaging voice and text-based conversational interfaces.
- Zapier: connects apps and automates workflows.
To learn more about and apply for the Summer Clinic Internship, please visit here.
There is less than two weeks left to apply! Visit our blog to learn more. Students and recent grads will not want to miss out on this amazing opportunity to not only gain the relevant experience they need in an internship, but to network and gain mentors that will help them actually land a full time job!