We are excited to announce an official partnership with Datawords.

This newly signed partnership will allow Datawords to help current and future clients integrate messaging and voice marketing tools to their digital marketing strategies. It will enable Assist to benefit from Datawords’ tech and multicultural expertise to deploy its platform at an international level by integrating new cultures, languages, etc.

When we think about taking brands global, being able to understand the local nuances of language is critical. This will ensure the highest quality, training, and understanding of the way people actually speak in different regions around the world.

We are just getting started but we are excited to help brands have great conversations anywhere in the world.

Read more about the partnership here: https://datawords.com/datawords-assist-partnership

Assist partners with Datawords to take chatbots international was originally published in Assist Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Aramark launches brew2you on Apple Business Chat

On today’s earnings call, Apple called out Aramark’s “brew2you” initiative, a pilot program that allows Phillies fans to order drinks for in-seat delivery via Business Chat. Aramark partnered with Assist to build the experience, which used Apple Pay for a seamless checkout.

This initiative is my favorite Assist project to date, simply because it improves the in-stadium ordering experience for all parties. Fans can place orders without getting up from their seats. There’s no need to wait in line, or pass your credit card down a row of strangers to pay — no need for your wallet at all, in fact. Servers can deliver more efficiently, Aramark can sell more drinks per game, and the time between my deciding I want a beer to holding it in my hand is drastically reduced. Business Insider noted “Apple has announced a handful of Business Chat partners…but the Aramark partnership is one of the first applications that I can see using” and it’s easy to see why.

The pilot was a long time in the making. In July of 2016, over 2 years before brew2you debuted in Citizens Bank Park, Shane’s post “Money from Messaging: The Impact of Brands in the Messaging Ecosystem” spoke to the potential for sports teams to connect with fans via messaging:

We went to a Warrior’s game this past season, but we didn’t buy tickets to the game. We were invited by a mutual friend. As a result, the Warriors had no way to speak to us after we left Oracle Arena. The opportunity to reach out with a promotion to buy tickets to a game or apparel from any one of our favorite players was left sitting like dried up sweat on the hardwood floor.

…What if you could instantly jump into a conversation with a brand or a business? That sending a message would allow you to order food to your seat, check stats, buy tickets and much, much more. That’s where the power of bots can be fully realized and appreciated. At scale, only a bot stands a chance of handling the load of so many concurrent conversations.

Similarly, 3 years ago, Peter Czimback, Aramark’s Sr. Director of Global Consumer Innovation, had envisioned a future where fans could connect with stadiums and teams via a single message thread. With the right technology, Aramark could help fans buy tickets, navigate to the stadium, order drinks for in-seat delivery, and stay updated post-game with information about special offers and promotions. The launch of Business Chat with its Apple Pay integration presented the perfect opportunity to bring that vision to life.

Stadium visitors access the experience by scanning a QR code with the iOS Camera. That deep-links them into a conversation with brew2you via the native Messages app. There’s no application to download or account to create — crucial in a crowded stadium where connectivity can be a challenge. And after a few taps and key strokes, they’ve placed their orders, added tips, and purchased using Apple Pay.

In scoping the experience, the Aramark and Assist teams agreed that 1-touch reordering would be a crucial component of the experience. Once you’ve placed your first order, your payment confirmation includes a prompt that allows you to place the same order again simply by confirming your purchase via Apple Pay.

Not only does this remove friction from the ordering experience, it hints at future opportunities for Aramark to “remember” visitors across multiple games or stadiums, learn their preferences, and quickly serve up habitual orders. It’s easy to contemplate a not-too-distant future where I arrive at a stadium (or restaurant, or bar), find my seat, ask Siri to “get me my usual” and receive my drink moments later.

Back in 2011, Assist’s cofounder Robert Stephens wrote about a “Hierarchy of Anticipation,” identifiable via repeated user behavior:

Once is a hint
Twice is a pattern
Three times is a preference
Four times is a habit

The idea that Siri and Aramark would know “my usual” speaks to an underlying recognition of my preferences, driven by past behavior. This pattern recognition offers opportunities for brands to be even more proactive with customer engagement. The next time I visited the stadium, what if Aramark pushed a message to me rather than wait for me to place my order? That message could prompt me to order my usual — or tell me it was already on its way to my seat.

As Robert said back in 2011:

Customers are giving us hints. Repeated hints are patterns. Repeating patterns are preferences. If those preferences are acknowledged, they become habits. Customers with habits are profitable.

This isn’t, and really never was, about automation. It’s about leveraging patterns of behavior to anticipate your customers’ needs.

Assist is the leading platform powering automation for businesses on messaging and voice. We power great brands like Sephora, Hyatt, Fandango, 1800Flowers, Lonely Planet, and more. Say hello hi@assi.st or learn more about us here http://assi.st.

Hey Siri, Get Me My Usual! was originally published in Assist Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Machine Yearning posts its fourth episode this week, and already we’re breaking our format. We approach the podcast like everything in life: stay rigid, get stuck, nothing but problems follow…

We’ve used this podcast to jump start conversations about how much we don’t know about the worlds of AI, machine learning, and conversational commerce. We’re standing right on the edge of the talking internet and we can feel the wind at our backs pushing us forward. We’re all making the leap, but when we’re honest with ourselves and others, we’re doing it knowing how little we’ve figured out but how much opportunity there is ahead of us.

Things are moving fast, but at Machine Yearning we want to go faster, so we headed out to the 2018 Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. Basically, the Cannes Lions is one of the most concentrated gatherings of the international advertising, marketing, technology and creative communities. We knew it would be a good place to speak with brilliant people and meet folks who weren’t on our radar — but deserved to be heard. We used the opportunity of being in a critical mass of great thinkers and doers, and healthy dose of serendipity, to roll up a ton of interviews.

The week over-delivered. The Cannes episodes that you’ll hear over the next few weeks will show why we find the AI and machine learning worlds so complicated, challenging and invigorating.

Empathy keeps emerging as a dominating, recurring theme. It’s fascinating to encounter one person after another grappling with the underlying question: if we can’t figure out how to speak, and listen, with empathy toward one another, how will we teach the machines to do it on our behalf?

Gender exclusion and cultural bias, we keep hearing, are going to kick our ass unless we make a major upgrade to our practices around diversity and inclusion. A monoculture of leaders, technologists and marketers will hobble these new opportunities. If we want to have an internet that works for everyone, we need everyone at the table.

Ultimately, people are obsessed about the need to create and operate at the highest levels of intentionality in this next phase of the internet. We can’t ignore the chorus of voices we’re encountering who warn that we won’t create meaningful experiences that improve peoples’ lives if we don’t dig in, get more people around the table and commit to service that goes beyond hitting the numbers.

Up this week, we have Australian filmmaker Jessica Allan, Facebook exec Eric Oldrin and LivePerson CEO Rob LoCascio. Next week, three more folks who are pressing up against big issues in AI and machine learning who were all interviewed from LivePerson’s base of operations in Cannes.

Well… OK… it was a boat. Actually, a yacht. LivePerson had an amazing yacht and they let us camp out and roll all these interviews. Big shout out and thanks to everyone at LivePerson! They were great.

Please say hello on Twitter. Subscribe on iTunes, Google Play, and Soundcloud. Make sure you share an episode or one of the chapter excerpts with a friend or colleague who cares about the talking internet and whether we get this right!

Here’s the specific chapters from our first 3 guests:

Robert LoCascio:

Jessica Allan:

Eric Oldrin:

Reach out to hi@assi.st if you’re interested in anything messaging and voice automation, chatbots, AI or just have some ideas. Assist is the leading enterprise platform for automated assistants on messaging and voice.

Machine Yearning goes to Cannes Lions was originally published in Assist Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Introducing Machine Yearning, our new podcast

In a world where no one is the expert and where everyone, even if they don’t want to let on, is scrambling to figure it out — why not come clean and get real?

That’s the point behind Machine Yearning, our new podcast. We’re launching Machine Yearning today with two episodes: Chris Messina and Kathryn Hume.

Machine Yearning is a place where we can gather together, talk, debate and dream about where we’re headed with AI, conversational commerce, our relationships with the machines and their impact on our language and culture.

We want the pod to be a place where you can hang with smart people who are guiding a fundamental reordering of how we interact with technology.

A few times a month we’ll drop the complete interview and some chapters that are extended excerpts. The chapters are designed for quick access to key ideas. We hope these’ll make it easier to share and advance the conversations you are having at work or with friends and colleagues. Let us know how the format is working for you.

Also — getting a wide range of voices and perspectives is our baseline. You probably know someone who could be a great guest. DM us @Assist with their name.

We have to create a permission space for not knowing. People barely know how this technology works and NO ONE knows where this is going. Machine Yearning is meant to be a gathering place where you can get reliable, well-considered ideas. It’s not journalism, but we did bring in some pretty good storytellers to help us get it in your feed. Mikel Ellcessor, one of the co-creators of Radiolab, and Paul Chuffo, a producer who has delivered over 100 long-form music documentaries, make Machine Yearning. Radiolab’s Jad Abumrad composed our theme.

You can find Machine Yearning in iTunes, Play, and Soundcloud. We’ll be rolling out to more platforms in the coming week. Please make sure you subscribe so you don’t miss an episode and, if you’re feeling it, a review helps more people discover the pod.

Reach out to hi@assi.st if you’re interested in anything messaging and voice automation, chatbots, AI or just have some ideas.

Dreaming About the Machine was originally published in Assist Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We’re excited to announce an official partnership with TimeTrade. TimeTrade is the leading intelligent scheduling platform for the enterprise.

Below is an interview with Cimarron Buser and Assist co-founder Robert Stephens. Cimarron Buser is SVP Business Development at TimeTrade. Since the day Robert founded GeekSquad in 1993, he has been thinking about selling time.

Enjoy the interview.

Cimarron Buser:

How does messaging and voice play into booking? Do you think booking is becoming more important?

Robert Stephens:

Well, let’s start at the beginning. Before there were death and taxes, the original constants in life were time and money. Even before the chicken and the egg conundrum, what came first, time or money? You know, there are really two things that people are doing in business: spending their money, and when they do it. In fact, in most commerce, there are really three questions that everybody asks of a business: can you do it, when can you do it, and how much will it cost?

With TimeTrade, there is a perfect partnership. It’s no accident, that when Apple announced the Apple Business Chat last year one of the first “use cases” they showed was a time picker. We’d like to think that what Square did for money, the TimeTrade-Assist partnership will do for time. It’s this ability to give businesses Uber-like dispatch capability. If you think about it everybody remembers the first time they took an Uber! Once you experience that low friction, there’s no going back.

For many businesses, for example, scheduling a dental appointment, it’s usually done through a clunky web interface or again, you have to download an app. We are combining messaging with this core competency. The first commerce capability in the messaging space was money and payments, thanks to Facebook and Stripe. Using TimeTrade’s platform, which has been around for a long time — it’s very well-known and used — we think this is going to open up the space for them as well as for all of Assist customers.

Cimarron Buser:

What’s different about this new interface versus what TimeTrade is currently doing on the web?

Robert Stephens:

Well, first, messaging is faster. It’s easier to deploy for businesses. It takes full advantage of TimeTrade capabilities. It fits perfectly in the timing of where we are with Facebook Messenger, Alexa, Google Assistant, and now Apple Business Chat.

We’ve seen this with Sephora. When people can make an appointment, we believe, and we’ve seen it, it really changes the psychology of the shopper. There’s a difference between, “These are the hours we’re open,” and “Here is an appointment for you. Here is time we’ve set aside for you.”

It’s just like OpenTable. It’s like making a reservation, this ability to book time. We think this is going to be so popular over time that businesses will offer appointments for things they didn’t do before. It could just be an estimate. It could be reserving a slot in time. There’s also the possibility where businesses that didn’t know they wanted this capability now have access to it.

We believe that voice and messaging are going to become the dominant way that people do it just because it’s so easy. It’s so much faster. Picking an appointment time benefits from the messaging interface because it’s really centered around the size of your phone. We actually believe that helps simplify the user interface, the experience that people have, because it’s designed for this smaller screen. Again, it’s usually can you do it, when can you do it?

Cimarron Buser:

Will brands need to adopt this to stay relevant? Will consumers begin to expect this?

Robert Stephens:

In this first wave, there are really two first customers we see.

First, people who are already using TimeTrade that will definitely want to expand their capabilities into messaging and voice with one integration. If you’re already on the TimeTrade platform, this is a no-brainer.

The other one is for people who want to experiment.

Let’s say you’re a retailer, and somebody’s interested in a product, and they look online. This ability to reserve a slot, it’s a big difference between saying, “We’re open, come at this time, and some person or something will be ready for you.” This is happening already… You can schedule deliveries now from the grocery store. This is starting to become a thing. People who use Uber and now can start to reserve movie seats. If you want to see the new “Avengers: Infinity War,” and you reserve a seat, it’s a totally different experience than showing up at the movie theater having no idea where you’re going to sit. And there’s a lot of use cases that haven’t included appointments that we think now can try it.

Cimarron Buser:

Do you feel like this reflects a bigger macro trend of the customer wanting ultimate control and brands trying to understand who is actually in their stores? One thing we hear from brands is they don’t really know who’s walking through the doors. Do you believe that this enables a whole different experience where you can acknowledge everyone walking in your store because you know who’s coming at what time?

Robert Stephens:

Yes.

This is where messaging with a business is much different than social media. Customers care about their privacy for their personal interactions, and I also want the retailer to know who I am, whether I’m having a great or a mediocre experience, and to help me privately. Yelp is the last resort to complain.

What TimeTrade does is it publishes the company’s resources that are available before you go to the store. This is great for retail brands who are trying to drive traffic. It’s a way of being more specific, acknowledging and being aware of who is walking in to your store.

Cimarron Buser:

Is the main difference between messaging and voice versus a website that you actually still can’t “hear the customer”? In other words, if they fell off in the flow, or they couldn’t find the right time, you can’t hear them because they’re not using words that are machine-readable. Is that a major difference between messaging and voice compared to the past?

Robert Stephens:

Yes, because for anything to be in messaging or voice, it’s in text. It’s your words. It’s machine-readable, which means you can analyze it. I want the hotel, or the airline, or the bank, to hear what I’m doing. If I keep asking a question over and over, they should detect that I’m frustrated. This is where, for lack of a better term, to use an exaggerated phrase, I want the companies to see everything I’m saying. Just like I want the airline to watch my luggage. I expect them to know where my stuff is.

Let’s look at the shopping cart. One of the big scourges of websites is abandoned shopping carts. An abandoned shopping cart is actually a cry for help.

Sometimes companies don’t have resources available at that exact moment.

But, if I knew a customer was looking at a product, had gone partly through the checkout flow and abandoned it because it’s computerized, I can record the state of the shopping cart. I can contact that person and say, “Would you like to set up a time for somebody to help you finish that?”

This is where TimeTrade really solves a key issue. We are creating an opportunity for our customers, especially in messaging, to get help. Simply from listening for the errors, a cry for help.

Cimarron Buser:

What do you mean by a company listening? What about privacy?

Robert Stephens:

What I mean is I want the company listening. There’s a spectrum here. I don’t want the airline to look inside my suitcase, but I need them to keep an eye on my suitcase from the moment I arrive at the airport until I pick it up at the baggage claim.

You know, I think this is what every customer wants. We want a company to constantly be listening. We believe customers don’t actually want to complain about a restaurant on Yelp. It would rather complain to the restaurant, because I would like to keep going back. We don’t expect companies to be perfect anymore, but we expect them to listen, and a big component of that is time. When. When can I talk to somebody?

The other thing that TimeTrade allows is more in-depth relationships with customers. There’s transactions that might not be tied to time. But this idea of setting aside appointments, it’s allocating time as a resource, and that enables new possibilities.

I’m personally more excited not about who’s going to take their existing scheduling appointment system and put them into messaging from their website. I’m excited about what businesses never offered appointments or scheduling that can now do that. There’s far more of those businesses. This is the use case for all brands to respect their customer’s time.

Not every movie theater lets you book a seat. But once you experience that, that is the preferred way of doing things. There’s a reason why OpenTable is dominant. We expect a restaurant to take appointments most of the time.

Cimarron Buser:

One thing you said that seems like a major macro trend that I haven’t heard before is, “Imagine if the shopping cart is a cry for help.” Today, what happens is that I get a hundred emails of a shopping cart abandonment message, follow-up, spam, marketing engine. What I think you said is that if the shopping cart abandonment led to a scheduling engine through messaging, all of a sudden, the brand can step in to truly help you and complete the purchase. It feels much different to me using booking as the shopping cart abandonment action to get you the right help — on your time — than it does to get a bunch of marketing emails saying like, “Hey, did you forget this item?”

Robert Stephens:

Yeah.

It provides an opportunity for the customer and the business. For the business, if they’re listening and watching all these interactions, this is something you couldn’t do before. There’s are people walking into a store. You don’t have their identity. This is the power of messaging. Consumers win because they want to get answers to those three questions. Can you do it? When can you do it? How much will it cost?

If they have any trouble with any of that, they want the company listening to them. Because it’s about people’s frustration and listening to them.

I’ve been in Lowe’s before and tried to talk somebody. I’m standing in the store. Now, retailers struggle with labor management. They can’t have endless payroll to have all the people walking the aisles. So there’s a trade-off there. For low prices, I have to usually schedule a time. There’s really no other way.

I wanted to order three bathtubs, replacements, in my home, and I couldn’t! I found somebody, but they couldn’t tell me when he was gonna get back to me. You keep people calm by keeping them informed.

Imagine a scenario where you’re just walking by yourself through the store. You have an idea. You’re able to communicate with the brand through messaging. You’re talking to a bot because it’s more efficient. Everything should be able to be automated, but when it can’t, this is where scheduling can come in.

This is very key concept that I learned building Geek Squad.

People don’t always need it immediately. They only ask for it out of frustration or simplicity. If you offer them an exact time, they are much more flexible on their time scale. “I’m willing to wait three days as long as you can commit to me.”

This solves the other big part of friction that we don’t think about, the customer’s time. They’re on a schedule. They have to pick up the kids from school. They know their schedule. The nice thing is when the customer’s already walking around with a copy of their free time and they’re willing to share that with the company in exchange for, “Hey, I need to get this thing done. I need to get this information.”

We believe, by the way, that customers prefer automation when the automation is done well. Done well, that’s the main point. We’re in the early phases of this trend. Just like when an abandoned shopping cart is a cry for help, we believe that, until companies work harder to improve their experiences, this is where the rubber meets the road. If a shopping cart is abandoned, that should be a red flag to the operations team that they need to redesign the confusion around that product or service…

The goal is to eliminate the need for so many resources. The consumers don’t even want that. They’d prefer it just to be seamless. We all would rather check in for a plane on our phone than to have to stand in line at the counter. The company can’t afford to staff that anyway. This is where appointments are part of helping improve customer experiences. Once you check-in for a flight and have a boarding pass on your phone, you never wait in line again. This is like that.

Cimarron Buser:

You tweeted almost three years ago that you thought Google Maps and Apple Maps were the perfect messaging application. When I saw Apple release Business Chat one of the entry points that seems very interesting is maps. Today, if you have a Business Chat experience on Apple iMessage, Apple Maps actually defaults to messaging first over the phone and website.

Is “time” one of the perfect use cases for the Maps entry point? It seems like if I’m looking on Maps, I need it now. I need to know where to go. Usually it has directions. Directions are actually time. I know when I’m going to get there. Is scheduling an appointment and time a macro trend that is connected to what you were saying about Maps a few years ago with this use case?

Robert Stephens:

Absolutely.

I mean, because time is one of the original fundamentals, along with money, before death, before taxes, before the chicken, before the egg. Time is one of the lowest friction offerings to a customer.

Even your little local hardware store, they might be busy with 10 customers right now, but there are slow times. And you’re seeing this now. If you open up Google Maps, one of the newest features they have offered is if you punch in a place to go…a store to go to in the morning at 7 am, and they don’t open till 10am, Google will warn you that if you head there now, they’re not going to be open when you arrive, or they’re closing soon.

So Google’s already begun to include time as a key element in the design. We believe this is going to play to TimeTrade’s strengths now that Apple is letting you chat. Because you’re right. The only actions we’ve been able to take up until now in a map application has been to call or to physically go there. Messaging now allows me to interact with a company beyond those two limiting choices.

The problem with phone calls is it ties the customer up in real time. It ties up the company. This is a business that isn’t even offering appointments. We believe companies should actually just… Don’t ask yourself, “Should you?” It’s more like, where could you use time as a resource and make it available? See what happens. This is how you uncover new products and services.

Technology disruption is really just asking questions. What new things can we do that we couldn’t before? And that’s why this is so important.

Taking payments through Apple Pay, Messenger, it’s slick, and it continues to get more and more friction-free. But time is now having its moment.

Cimarron Buser:

Great. Is there anything else that you want to end with or why you personally are just so excited about this?

Robert Stephens:

I’m personally excited because, you know, my background with Geek Squad really was about selling time.

It’s about showing up on and being on time. It’s about selling time as a resource.

Before there was Uber and ordering a car to where you were, there was ordering a Geek around. I had always dreamed… I had to build my own dispatches so I know how hard it is. It’s not something most companies can do. That’s why they don’t offer it. That’s why the TimeTrade capability is exciting because you combine the low friction of messaging and voice with the ability to make time available to your customers.

We are really excited about the potential of this TimeTrade and Assist partnership. Thanks to TimeTrade, time has finally become money.

—

Assist is the leading platform powering automation for businesses on messaging and voice. We power great brands like Sephora, Hyatt, Fandango, 1800Flowers, Lonely Planet, and more. Say hello hi@assi.st or learn more about us here http://assi.st.

TimeTrade has pioneered an expanded role for intelligent scheduling solutions to enhance the entire customer journey and help companies engage with their customer at each phase of that journey. This integration drives personalized appointments as well as smart solutions for analytics and reporting; chat bots and customized recommendations for concierge-level services.

Time Becomes Money with Assist/TimeTrade Partnership was originally published in Assist Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Facebook announces Camera Effects for Messenger

Today at F8, Facebook announced the release of Camera Effects into the Messenger platform. As part of the launch, Assist partnered with Sephora and Jam3 to bring the power of Facebook’s AR studio to the messaging experience.

By launching Sephora’s Camera Effect on Messenger, users can “try on” 5 pre-populated makeup looks using the camera on their phone in selfie mode. They can take pictures of themselves “wearing” each look and message those images to friends or add them to Facebook Stories. They can also purchase products to re-create the look, or book an appointment for an in-store makeover, all from the Messenger app.

With the new Sephora Virtual Artist feature in our Sephora bot, our clients can virtually try on makeup, purchase the products and book a makeover all within Messenger. We’re thrilled to be one of the first brands to use AR on the Messenger Platform, revolutionizing the Sephora shopping experience with our clients where they are, when they need us, in the most natural conversational way.

Bridget Dolan, SVP of Omni Experiences and Innovation for SEPHORA

The camera’s role in driving consideration

Sephora’s Camera Effect builds on the Messenger experience they launched in 2016: helping users book makeovers at any store in North America. Messenger drove an 11% conversion lift over Sephora’s mobile website, allowing users to book makeovers in 5 fewer steps.

Sending customers in-store for makeovers is an important part of Sephora’s acquisition strategy: shoppers can try on makeup products to see what works for them. In the buyer’s decision making journey (from Awareness through to Purchase) it’s an important part of the Consideration phase. With Camera Effects, Sephora effectively brings an in-store try on experience to a user’s phone, allowing them to experiment with different makeup products via Messenger. This is more than just a fun feature I can share with friends: as I try on looks, I’m essentially using my phone to give myself a makeover without having to walk into a Sephora store. Once I’ve decided on my favorite look, I can buy the products within the message thread, or book an appointment for an in-store makeover if I’m not quite ready to purchase.

What does this mean for Messenger, and conversational commerce?

To date, it’s been challenging to drive buyer Consideration via messaging platforms. As a consumer, I can select an item from a category, or answer questions to find my “perfect gift,” but beyond that my ability to browse or research a product are limited. This presents a challenge to brands driving high-consideration purchases: jewelry, accommodations, or home furnishings for example. In these categories, the buyer’s Consideration phase is longer and more complex, and often includes the following:

1. Try Before Buy: I want to “experience” the product in context
2. Repeat Visits: I return to the product or experience multiple times to assess and validate my decision
3. Solicit Advice: I want input from a family member, friend or advisor

With Camera Effects, Messenger launched an in-thread browsing experience that facilities all 3 of these :

1. Try Before Buy: I can use the camera to picture that couch inside my living room
2. Repeat Visits: I can easily and frequently access my conversation and return to the camera from my Messenger app
3. Solicit Advice: I can share images to get input and advice from advisors or co-decision makers

Introducing the camera into the consumer journey adds context and specificity to help drive Consideration. From the unique contours of the face to the particularity of a room, the camera allows consumers to see how products fit into their lives, making conversion more natural and feasible.

Consider it like a pop-up shop for your product that really hustles — it lives within one of the most popular messaging platforms in the world, and allows people to bring products into their own spaces to visually address the question: “is this right for me?” No new app install required, and purchasing with customer support are offered in-Messenger, so you’ve have a personally relevant end-to-end shopping experience all in one place. Using AR effects in camera drives users from Awareness to Conversion in a seamless and unique to consumer process, propelled by conversation.

From laying out furniture in a way that makes the most of a small space, to finding the best shade of lipstick, to trying on clothes, shoes and accessories, it’s not only important for people to see how physical items would exist in their own world, but also to solicit input from others. This step in the process is addressed in Messenger camera with intuitive built-in video and image sharing.

Interactive Commerce and the Camera

The integration of the camera into the sales journey unlocks endless opportunities for interactive commerce more broadly.

Consider how buying a poster or framed print becomes more accurate and feasible if you could hold your phone up to a wall to see how the piece would fit, pinch/zoom to find the perfect size for your space and immediately convert that size into a price for purchase. Intuitive UI, AR capabilities, and in-app purchasing make poster shopping easier than ever without unnecessary drilling.

Consider trying on glasses, hats and other accessories that require selfies, without store clerks and random shoppers gazing over while you check yourself out. Removing discomfort and allowing the right amount of privacy in the sales funnel improves the process of consideration, removing blockers and awkwardness that can get in the way of conversion.

AR isn’t just a progression of the camera, it’s an entirely new opportunity for shopping and conversational UI. The context in messaging has evolved and today, it’s at its best with these three key elements in combination:

• Text — traditionally, the primary form of messaging
• Camera — allowing the user to see themselves with product in their environment
• AR — bringing more realistic context to the experience

When it comes to conversational commerce experiences, a partnership with AR effects is natural. Users are already getting a more organic and reciprocal experience through conversation, driven by consumer needs. As conversational interfaces continue to flourish, more and more questions can be answered in a bot experience. Similarly, AR effects fit right in as users are empowered to see products in context. The exponential possibilities of AR effects enabled by camera integration and the rapid development of conversational AI are a solid match.

Using the camera for AR can propel forward-thinking brand engagement. But, for the process of interaction to leave a mark, collaboration between creative and technology are vital in driving messaging. This has been a hallmark of our partnership with Jam3 — thoughtful strategy to address a brand’s particular needs, with expertise in AR, UX, design and development allow us to elevate universal experiences by delivering a personal takeaway for a user who captures or shares. From ideation to production, creative solutions are essential to making modern experiences like Sephora on Messenger sing.

Assist and Jam3 are excited to continue working together to bring these kinds of experiences to brands, products and shopping experiences all over the world. Reach out to us anytime — we’d love to talk through bringing your sales funnel into the fold.

Reach out to hi@assi.st or info@jam3.com for more details

Try Before You Buy: Interactive Commerce in Messenger was originally published in Assist Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

As a kid, I loved getting the Service Merchandise catalog. I grew up in the ‘80s, and getting a department store catalog in the mail was an event. My sister and I had to work out a system to share the one precious catalog in our house. We’d both mark it up and make our Christmas wish list. Then we’d go to the store to look at the toys to see how they worked.

Service Merchandise stores were a catalog showroom. You could find most of the stuff from their catalog in their store setup for demonstration. When you were ready to buy something, you didn’t add it to your cart. There were no carts. You took the item info and used that to check out with a cashier. Your cashier would call back to the stockroom, and the stuff you ordered would come out on a conveyor belt.

I loved to watch the conveyor belt to see what other people were buying.

I thought of Service Merchandise a couple of weeks ago when I saw a tweet from Neil Gaiman about a bookstore in the UK called Foyles. In a piece from 1992, Gaiman mentioned that Foyles was one of London’s most irritating bookshops. He described the book buying process like this:

Neil Gaiman on Twitter

As I remember, you got in a line and handed over the books to someone who gave you a slip of paper you took elsewhere in the building and paid and then returned with a receipt to the first place to get your books... https://t.co/1YGJbEIfgw

Think about how this would’ve worked. You’ve sorted through a sea of books and found the one you want to buy. From wherever you are standing you need to walk your book over to a desk to get a purchase order. Once you have your purchase order, you have to pay for your book. The purchase desk is on the other side of the store, and now you’re walking across the store towards that desk to pay. There’s a line to pay for books. The person in front of you needs to pay with a check. Finally, it’s your turn to pay. You hand over your purchase order and pull out your wallet, decide which card to use, and swipe it. Your card doesn’t work on the first try. You look and realize the mag reader is only on one side, you flip your card over, and your transaction starts processing. Excellent, now you’ve paid and need to take your receipt back to the first desk. Once you get there, you show your receipt and collect your book to take it home.

A book would have to be amazing to get you to jump through those hoops.

Going through these steps to buy a book feels like ancient history in a world where almost 130 million* people can order something on Amazon and have it on their doorstep in under two hours.

*Based on the population of metro areas served by Amazon Prime Now as reported by WolframAlpha.

Make customers feel like they are in the future

When you remove barriers for customers, it changes patterns of how and when they buy. Need some spaghetti sauce for dinner? You can go out of your way to stop and pick some up on the way home, or you can order it from Amazon before you leave the office and have it waiting on your doorstep when you get home.

You need to create systems so customers can save time and the mental energy of having to run cost/benefit analysis in their head. Our goal should be to free them to get what they need and move on.

Think about checking into a hotel. You’ve made a reservation and the hotel knows you’re coming. Why do you have to wait in line to talk to someone to get your key? I love to take my family to Disney World and checking in used to be the pits. Waiting in line for an attraction is one thing. Waiting in line to get into our room after an 8+ hour drive with two kids is not fun. They are bouncing off the walls and ready to see Mickey Mouse, not sit in a lobby and wait to check-in.

The entire check-in process all changed a couple of years ago when I could check-in online before we left home. Disney mails us our hotel keys on Magic Bands. These are RF bracelets that include our hotel keys, park tickets, and other relevant info. Now we can drop our bags off at the hotel and go do whatever we want. Everything we need to start our vacation is on our Magic Band.

The Magic Brand is great, but it’s still a passive tool. Imagine if you could use a similar tool to create an active experience with voice automation. Ask it for dinner reservations. It remembers how many people are in your room and that you’re going to an event later that night. Need your car? You can find a house phone or wait at the valet stand. Or you could pull out your phone by the pool and ask for your car to be ready in twenty minutes.

Voice automation isn't new, but voice interaction in our homes and our pockets offer exciting opportunities to create these kinds of experiences. Last year, we launched Google Assistant on the Assist platform. One of the first experiences we built connected 1-800-Flowers to make it simple to use the Google Assistant to order flowers with your voice. Here's how it works.

The process of ordering flowers has evolved quickly over the last 50 years. The first evolution happened when you could pick up the phone and buy flowers. Before the telephone, you had to walk into a shop and make your order. Calling was more convenient than walking to the store, but you might have to wait on the phone.

As convenient as ordering on the phone could be, you couldn't even see the flowers you were buying. When the web came around ordering flowers changed again. You could skip the hold time and see your flowers, but you had to set up an account with your shipping info and manage your payment data.

Facebook Messenger and Google Assistant take ordering flowers to the next step. No hold times. You can use payment info you keep on file with Facebook or Google.

Now when you want to order flowers for someone all you need is a few minutes and your phone. You can talk to Google Assistant just like you would to someone in your local flower shop, and you're done in minutes without having to pull out your credit card.

Automation takes commitment

Automation isn’t a cure-all for friction in your sales cycle. You can’t set up an automated conversation workflow one day and never think about it again. What you build today is a starting point and should help you discover what you’ll need to improve tomorrow. Your conversational layer should fully integrate with your website, phone, and support infrastructure.

In a world where the home button of every phone in the world is one phrase away from your entire brand experience, a lot is going to change. “Let me talk to…” “Hey Siri” and “Alexa, …” is going to change everything we think about how we talk to brands.

Assist is the chatbot platform for the enterprise. We power Sephora, Fandango, Hyatt, 1–800-Flowers and more on Google Assistant, Facebook Messenger, Twitter DMs and Amazon Alexa. If you are interested in automated solutions for messaging or voice, please send us a note: hi@assi.st. Learn more about Assist here: http://assi.st

Remove friction to win tomorrow’s customers was originally published in Assist Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The Assist platform now supports the Google Assistant and their launch of transactions.

We are excited to launch some of the first commerce experiences on the Google Assistant and chart new territory on this new hybrid space that is both messaging and voice.

Just ask your Assistant on your phone for flowers.

Working alongside our great partner, 1-800-Flowers, you can now ask the Google Assistant “Ok Google, talk to 1-800-Flowers.”

This is the first step in enabling a future where you can speak to your phone and get what you want from any brand, service or information source.

Assist is excited to be a launch partner and bring more brands to the Google Assistant.

We are also excited for the future of the Google Assistant on Google Home as well. We launched Lonely Planet earlier this year and are rolling out the next version soon.

Assist is the chatbot platform for the enterprise. We power Sephora, Fandango, Hyatt, 1–800-Flowers and more on Google Assistant, Facebook Messenger, Twitter DMs and Amazon Alexa. If you are interested in automated solutions for messaging or voice, please send us a note: hi@assi.st. Learn more about Assist here: http://assi.st

Google Assistant + Assist Platform was originally published in Assist Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Yesterday, Facebook added 3 recommendations to M, Messenger’s virtual assistant. M will now prompt users to share gifs, use pre-populated Quick Replies, and summon Fandango’s Chat Extension to view trailers and book movie tickets.

Chat Extensions allow users to launch and share branded experiences within the Messenger platform. They appear in Messenger’s Composer drawer, and clicking on a Chat Extension launches a webview with content or additional functionality that can easily be shared back into a message thread.

The announcement adds Fandango to a handful of brands (including Spotify, Food Network and Lyft) at M’s virtual fingertips, offered into message threads when prompted by keywords like “movie.” The steady growth of M’s roster hints at a not-too-distant future where thousands of brands move in and out of Messenger conversations, their Chat Extension a key entry point for discovery.

M + Chat Extension = Brand Discovery
Historically, consumers have found brands on Messenger through 1 of 3 methods:

1. Messenger’s search function
2. Messenger’s Discover tab
3. Branded marketing (e.g. Promoted Post with Messenger code.)

The combination of M + Chat Extension is an important 4th discovery tool because it inserts brands into message threads when users might not otherwise know to engage them. I may have no idea I can chat with Food Network until I reference “recipe” and see an M recommendation — but their Chat Extension fundamentally changes the way I think about Messenger’s ability to offer me relevant content at exactly the right moment.

M + Chat Extension = Messaging is the new Search
The impact M’s recommendations, though, extends beyond just discovery: M + Chat Extension connected me to Food Network at a time when I might have left Messenger and initiated a search. With M + Chat Extension, brands harness a conversion tool that connects them to users while they move through the conversion funnel. Just as Google built a business monetizing keywords that suggested intent, M’s recommendations (triggered by keywords) seem to hint at future opportunities for paid brand promotion, and Facebook monetization.

And let’s not forget, too, that this comes with a better user experience. For example:

Without M Recommendation or Chat Extension:

• I kick off a Messenger thread about seeing a movie on Saturday night
• A friend suggests we find showtimes for “Kingsman: The Golden Circle.” She searches for the trailer and shares the top result — a YouTube link — into the thread
• I click on the link which launches the trailer in my YouTube app
• I search for showtimes and types our options into the thread. We agree on a time and destination.
• I launch my browser and use search to navigate to Fandango.com to purchase tickets

This conversation requires us to navigate between several mobile apps and web pages, and to copy/paste information into the message thread. It’s an awkward, fragmented experience that requires me to search and chat simultaneously to complete my purchase alongside a group.

With M Recommendation and Chat Extension:

• I kick off a group chat about seeing a movie on Saturday night
• M recommends that I “Find Showtimes” in Fandango’s Chat Extension, where I can watch the trailers and find local theaters
• I watch the Kingsman trailer, share showtimes into the message thread and we agree on a time and theater
• We each complete our purchases from Messenger’s webview

This group conversation took place exclusively within Messenger and its webview, with no need to search or launch other apps to retrieve information. M’s recommendation simplified the transaction process, and reduced the likelihood of our abandoning purchase. And, naturally, conversion is easily attributed back to Messenger: everyone wins.

If you are interested in automated solutions for messaging or voice, please send us a note: hi@assi.st. Learn more about Assist here: http://assi.st

M Recommendations, or How Messaging Replaces Search was originally published in Assist Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I can’t believe I get to write this post. My first post actually. At Assist, we’re building the dream team.

We are building the kind of culture where people truly do their best work, with the most amazing people around them. I’m so excited to bring three of the best people I’ve ever worked with back together. Today I couldn’t be more excited to officially welcome three incredible women to our team; Katja, Amanda, and Martha.

I hired Katja and Amanda at Twitter when we were initially building out the sales team and I knew in their first week that they were two people I’d want to work with again and again. They actually became known as the “Felson/Nelson” duo and were two people that their peers and other cross-functional teams could always count on. Soon after I started at Assist, I reached out to both. Katja joined a few months ago as our director of product management and Amanda is joining next week as our director of platform partnerships.

Martha moved to San Francisco from the Twitter Dublin office to work on Amanda’s team and was crushed to hear Amanda was leaving to work at Airbnb. Martha was always someone that I would hear about as being a consistent top performer and the kind of person you want on your team. When I visited the Dublin office she brought so much amazing energy to the room and asked such thoughtful questions. When we caught up a few months ago after she left Twitter, I just knew she was someone who had to join our team. So she is. Martha is going to be joining me as a sales leader to help build our business.

Exciting times at Assist. And we’re just getting started.

We are hiring and we’d love to hear from you. Here is how we think about company perks.

Assist is the leading platform powering automation for businesses on messaging and voice. We power great brands like Sephora, Hyatt, Fandango, 1800Flowers, Lonely Planet, and more. Say hello hi@assi.st or learn more about us here http://assi.st.

Welcome to Assist! was originally published in Assist Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.