Legacy Brands Create Chatbots as Mass Adoption Gets Up and Running

You might think that chatbots are the preserve of startups, trendier brands and services with massive volumes of customer interactions. If that’s the case, why is Quaker Oats, one of the oldest brands on the planet running a bot? And they’re not alone as traditional brands realise the value in chatbots.

Of all the brands we were expecting to see with a chatbot, Quaker Oats wasn’t at the top, middle or bottom of the list. But, as reported in The Drum, Quaker has a Facebook Messenger bot, called OTIS, now online to handle all questions oaty, and to help drag the brand into a consumer world dominated by Cheerios and covered-in-chocolate-pop-things. To be fair, the brand is owned by Pepsi, which is a bit more grounded in digital reality, but it shows the need to create and keep bots going in this faddish world.

Quaker Oats isn’t totally new to technology, offering recipe ideas through Alexa and Google Home devices for some time, but the bot on its US Facebook page, followed by 1.6 million people). The chatbot can provide recipes, health and nourishment tips, support for buyers and help people find Quaker products on online stores.

The bot has been going since 2017 and produced thousands of chats, which might not be in the millions bracket, but every little helps — especially for old-fashioned brands that have to compete with digital-era brands like ASOS and its Enki super-sales bot for clothes and fashion. British Airways followed the rest of the airline market with a bot a couple of years back, while Co-Op tried a bot for can insurance quotes.

Create Chatbots and Converse With Your Consumers

Bots for simpler brands or businesses don’t have to be cutting-edge, but to create chatbots and get them in the public eye is half the battle to gaining both business and consumer awareness of bots. From there, the business can then take the steps to acquire useful customer thoughts, information and data, drive sales and upsell services, and the other benefits that chatbots can offer.

Any business can create a chatbot, using cloud services like SnatchBot, and you don’t need an app team or IT department to do it. Like most cloud services, anyone can build, test and launch a chatbot, even adding AI features like natural language processing to broaden the conversation. Bots can be developed using simple trees of conversation, often based on your existing company FAQs or other support tools.

But bots can do a lot more, allowing customers to express a wider range of preferences than your typical feedback form. They can encourage customers to see and read more about a product or service, and chatbots can answer specific questions or find information that the customer is asking for.

Chatbots Will Be Everywhere

While the technology is evolving fast, even a small business with a chatbot can offer a 24/7 service in multiple languages, giving them an advantage over those that aren’t swayed by new technology. That alone is a great reason to be looking at bots, and if these big old brands are getting on board, that’s a good sign that other those in businesses and markets will be paying attention.

Bots can take the tone of voice of a business and play with it to engage with customers, having some fun or dropping interest facts into the conversation. Most bots will be an extension of an established brand or business identity, but there’s still plenty of room for bots to add value to a customer’s day.

Soon bots will be part of smart home, public access and smartphone services, far removed from your original website. Helping people manage their kid’s education, car services, flights and hotels, and many other areas of life, and they will wonder about any company without a chatbot.

So, if you haven’t taken an interest so far, now would be the best time to start, because chatbots are here to stay, and will make a huge impression for brands and businesses as customers expect to be able to engage whenever they like in an interactive manner.