Can a Chatbot Help Get People in the Festive Shopping Mood?

Since Christmas is all about family and the “festive spirit,” it doesn’t seem like a great time of year for chatbots to take some of the load. However, seasonal bots can help as Santa’s elves, present advisors, do the shopping for busy people and — of course — given real workers a break.

Themed bots are increasingly a thing, helping stores and brands get in touch with digital natives around whatever event is up next on the calendar. For the recent Halloween shindig, there were several spooky bots available that could help out with costumes, scary memes, ghostly games, TV recommendations and more.

Come Christmas and there seems to be somewhat less interest in Santa-related bots this year. Perhaps because it is hard for chatbots to generate that magical feel. A quick search shows that you wouldn’t be stretching the mince pie rations far to deal with the three Santa bots listed in a 2016 article. At best those Facebook Messenger bots managed a few hundred likes between them.

The “real” Santa Claus does a bit better with 133,000 followers on Facebook, but he doesn’t have a single elf on chatbot duty to talk to eager children while checking out the festive timer and white Christmas scenes that fill his timeline. There’s also business lag which may explain the delay in new Christmas bots as marketers and PRs are still cleaning up their offices after the Black Friday and Cyber Monday chaos.

Yet, for brands, bots are an increasingly important part of the marketing effort as AI gets to know customers’ needs better and bots. Fashion continues to lead the way with ASOS’ Enki bot on Google Home or Assistant showing the latest must-wear winter warmers and fashions.

The Gift of the Bot

Perhaps “gift chatbots” is a more realistic search idea, as parents and grandparents scramble for ideas for those hard-to-buy-for relatives. Payments firm Square has a useful piece for businesses on how bots can help out with gift ideas and support, highlighting that: “Chat apps have already surpassed the use of social media for answering customer service questions, and audiences will soon expect them from most businesses.”

In recent years, leading brands have been well aware of the benefits, with LEGO’s long-standing Messenger chatbot offering clever ideas for kids. But Christmas doesn’t have to be all about presents, bakery Greggs also had a gift-me-lunch bot last year, and is still running for 2019’s festive season.

“The festive season is all about generosity and giving, and we’ve now made it easier than ever to give the gift of Greggs, so there really is no excuse for a disappointing secret Santa present this year,” said Hannah Squirrell, customer director at Greggs. “We’re excited to be the first company to use bot technology for gifting in the UK and we hope our customers get into the spirit of the bot, even after the Christmas period.”

As part of a trend in personal shoppers, perhaps people don’t need a dedicated seasonal bot. The likes of Jet Black, a startup funded by Walmart’s incubator offers U.S. pressed-for-time families personal shopping through a bot text message interface. It offers free delivery, gift wrapping, curated recommendations and competitive pricing, whatever it is you need, they can pick up and deliver (within reason), from any store or chain.

Finally, one of the main reasons that bots can be winners for companies this year is that they can give staff more time back for their holidays. The banking sector might not be known for its “Ho ho ho”, but even they recognise that bots can take some of the strain for customer service tasks.

From this quick check, it is clear there is still plenty of time and room for businesses large and small look to offer customers something different with their chatbot that either makes use of the festive season for marketing, or provides benefits to customers or workers over the holidays.

Easy to build chatbot services like SnatchBot allow anyone to build a bot that can use the latest AI tools to engage and attract customers with imagery, emojis and video — it doesn’t just have to be about endless text or narrow button lists.