You need chatbots only if you have a poorly organized webpage – or to appear modern. I couldn’t have been more wrong, as I learned on the Oracle Openworld 2020 in London in Harald Behnke’s presentation “Conversational CX – From Chatbots to Invisible Interfaces Everywhere”.

Chatbots are not (only) an extension to your webpage. They are a new channel to interact with your customers. The penetration of WhatsApp and Facebook messenger are tremendous. 97% of the younger persons in Europe use WhatsApp and 75% of the overall European population. The messengers are on our mobile. They are with us wherever we go. The message of the presentation was: wave one was the web, wave two is mobile, and wave three will be chatbots.

The first benefit of chatbots relates to the pre-sales / a pre-purchase phase. As a company, you can be happy and should support customers interacting with you on a messenger such as a Facebook or WhatsApp chatbot (WhatsApp is currently launching its Business-API). The reason is simple: Each customer contacting you via a messenger is not search for the answer using Google – and being bombarded with advertisement from your competitors targeting your customers.

The second benefit of chatbots relates to the post-sales and service phase. Chatbots reduce call center load, especially for the mass market. They presented chatbot Holly from Hermes in the UK as an example. In December 2019, the chatbot solved 59% of service requests respectively 1 million requests reducing the call center load tremendously, e.g., regarding missing parcels.

The third benefit is using chatbots as a remote control. Many devices do not have classic displays for web, especially in the world of Internet of Things (IoT). A chatbot might be an easy and obvious solution as a remote control.

You might wonder why Oracle address the chatbot market? They are interested in the integration business. A chatbot is not just doing small talk, it is there to solve customer requests and sell products. Therefore, the chatbots need to interact with databases and business applications – in a reliable way. And that’s Oracle’s core business.

And, a final remark, Oracle and Amazon are competitors, but the presenter gave a hint to think about which messenger to support. Everybody might be aware of Alexa, but tremendously more customers use WhatsApp or the Facebook Messenger. However, it is also clear that the companies are quite reluctant to invest in chatbot technologies, otherwise, they would not have advertised that they are open for co-innovation in this area.

By the way, the next and final article about the Oracle Openworld 2020 London will be a collection of various smaller topics in the area of human-computer interactions …

All my Oracle Openworld London 2020 articles:

• Oracle Openworld Learning 1: Moving your applications to the cloud and moving to a cloud application is something completely different
• Oracle Openworld Learning 2: How the Cloud impacts the Software Customization Business
• Oracle Openworld Learning 3: The True Value of Chatbots
• Oracle Openworld Learning 4: The Oracle Database, ML, and Bitcoin – plus how Computer and Emotions come together