#7: AI and Chatbots: Build lasting relationships with your audience
Artificial intelligence (AI) in the form of chatbots and other automated conversation engines has seen massive improvements over the last few years. These chatbots have become a potent and valuable tool for public engagement campaigns, capable of expanding their reach and maintaining connections with a community in a way that would be impossible, were those connections to be forged without digital support. Setting up a chatbot is a quick and low-cost way to engage with individuals within a community, answer their questions, and gather real-time feedback about your project—at the convenience of your audience.
What are Chatbots?
Chatbots are essentially a way to interact with a database of information conversationally. They can appear in the service of every conceivable brand or organization, using AI to parse what a user writes or says and responding in kind. Chatbots mimic the conversational language that a human in a call center would use, saving and analyzing the resulting discussions to help a project glean insight from the kinds of questions and responses raised by a user.
Here are a few popular channels for chatbots and AI:
Websites. Public engagement campaigns can insert chatbots into their websites and even set them up to connect to a human member of the team during work hours should the AI be stumped by an inquiry.
Social Media. Facebook Messenger and other social media-based communication platforms offer tools to publish a chatbot on their platforms and have them perform just as they would on a website.
Voice Assistants and Telephones. Text-to-speech and speech-to-text technology have improved in tandem, with tech going into creating a chatbot. That means phone calls and voice assistants like Alexa and Google Assistant can act as audible versions of a purely text-based AI.
How can chatbots improve public engagement?
24-hour communication. Chatbots are always reachable and can instantly answer questions while presenting a friendly digital face to the audience for your project.
Automatic Feedback. The AI doesn’t have to be passive. It can include follow-up questions posed to the user or offer short surveys at the end of a conversation, deepening the pool of data available to the project.
Broader engagement. It’s a lot more efficient to deploy a number of chatbots than to staff and manage a call center. All of the conversations via chatbots can be easily analyzed, providing insights that can inform improvements to a project and the associated public engagement campaign.
Chatty AI
Chatbots are a handy engagement tool because they are easy to interact with and expand and supplement the capabilities of a traditional workforce. People intuitively understand how to get the most out of talking to a chatbot, and the AI simply needs to have the capacity to respond. Chatbots are also a great way to steer individuals to other facets of your campaign, whether by suggesting the user sign up for an email newsletter, follow a social media account, or attend a live or virtual event. As digital surrogates, a chatbot can directly express the message of your campaign to members of your audience and bring back intelligence, artificial or not, on what is working for the campaign so far. Be sure to come back next week when we look at how inclusive design can enhance a project and deepen public engagement.
Interested in seeing these trends in your outreach? Let’s get to work, give us a call and schedule a meeting today.
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