One day, all businesses will have their own chatbot.

Search for a product, find a piece of information, order a meal or just get organised…chatbots or conversational agents can be found increasingly on the customer journey. It’s a breakthrough that can be explained by technological developments and by our need for instant results.

Available 24/7, bots are increasingly part of our daily lives. They don’t just enrich the customer relationship, but by answering the frequently asked questions, they free up sales personnel and advisors to concentrate on tasks that add value.

An accepted technology.

According to a recent survey carried out by Uberall, 80% of consumers who have interacted with a chatbot have found the experience generally positive. Proof that people like the technology and have even been seduced by it. It is already present in numerous market sectors: from food, to ready to wear, to property rentals, insurance, and, of course, travel.

Simplify the client journey.

Air France, Expedia and Kayak, travel’s pure players are using bots increasingly. The reason is clear: it delegates the complexity of the booking and saves time. Hotels, flights, car hire…everything can now be organised via Facebook Messenger. Organised and even paid for by users.

OUIbot: the seamless experience.

Here there is no need to “leave the conversation” and be redirected to the website to finalise the transaction. With OUI.bot, the search, reservation and payment are all made in the same place in a more natural, conversational way.

And if the bot can’t answer or if the client just prefers it, an advisor can take over with a guaranteed response time of two hours. But OUI.sncf is not planning to stop there.

What if tomorrow everything was voice activated?

In partnership with Facebook’s innovation teams, SNCF is already working on developing new services around creating content, curating trips and mainly improving the conversational possibilities. Last February, for the anniversary of the OUI.sncf brand, digital screens were introduced over the course of one week. So now users can, with their voices, chat to the bot to obtain information and reserve their next trip. What if this was the future?

Vocal recognition at the forefront.

It is estimated that by 2020 vocal searches will represent 30% of the total volume of searches and that this figure may reach 50% on Google (Source: Etude Agence Conversationnel). The growth can be explained by the increase in vocal assistant equipment (65% expected between 2018 and 2020) and by improvements in efficiency. Their success rate today is between 90 and 95% and it is estimated that a rate of over 95% will allow voice recognition to reach a very wide public in 2020 (Source: Business Insider Intelligence).

When we know that immediacy is at the heart of the customer experience and that on average we type 53 words a minute on a keyboard compared to 161 with the voice: the spoken word seems to be the future.