What Happened
Microsoft has officially launched Teams to take on other enterprise chat apps such as Slack and Hipchat. The app is now available on iOS and Android smartphones and also downloadable for desktop devices running Windows and Mac. At launch, Microsoft Teams comes with about a dozen chatbots, most of which are also available on Slack.
Among the usual suspects, there is the Polly bot for conducting a quick poll among coworkers, the Statsbot for pulling data and reports from sources like Google Analytics and Salesforce, a Zenefits bot for managing vacation days, and a Kayak bot for checking flight information, all without leaving Teams. Microsoft says around 150 integrations with software and service are planned and will be added to Teams over the rest of the year.
What Brands Need To Do
The rise of workplace chat apps, influenced by the mass adoption of messaging apps as the primary communication channel on mobile, is quickly changing the way people communicate at work or in other professional contexts. They also offer brands a valuable inroad to reach customers at work and provide value. As they continue to overtake email as the primary communication tool at work and blur the line between private and professional communications, it is important that brands take the initiative to come up with a chatbot strategy to more effectively reach their customers via conversational interactions.
How We Can Help
The Lab has extensive experience in building Alexa Skills and chatbots to reach consumers on conversational interfaces. So much so that we’ve built a dedicated conversational practice called Dialogue. The NiroBot we built in collaboration with Ansible for Kia is a good example of how Dialogue can help brands build a conversational customer experience, supercharged by our stack of technology partners with best-in-class solutions and an insights engine that extracts business intelligence from conversational data.
If you’d like to learn more about how to effectively reach consumers on conversational interfaces, or to leverage the Lab’s expertise to take on related client opportunities within the IPG Mediabrands, please contact our Client Services Director Samantha Holland ([email protected]) to schedule a visit to the Lab.
Source: VentureBeat
Header image courtesy of Microsoft Team’s website
