Conversational commerce: killer direct channel or just plain confusing?

Driving so-called'conversational commerce' is the next phase in the travel company-customer relationship but it's a complicated affair, as Pamela Whitby has been finding out In what Thomson is hailing as an'industry first', last week the holiday group said it would trial a travel search tool using IBM's Watson Technology, which uses natural language processing (NLP) and artificial intelligence to allow computers to think like a human. In a company press release, Jeremy Osborne, Director of Strategic Innovation, TUI UK&I is quoted saying: "We wanted to test whether a conversational search experience would resonate with our customers as a new, fun and easy way to find their ideal holiday". And the response, it seems, was overwhelmingly positive with 77% of participants in the survey saying they would find a virtual assistant useful. The idea is that Thomson customers will be able to interact via a simple chat interface to get responses in real-time to their holiday queries.For the uninitiated, this may sound like Thomson is launching a chat bot. But the group's conversational tool, which is still in beta, is still one step away from this. IBM's Watson Technology, which Thomson is using, is not a chat bot solution in itself, but rather a tool to use for NLP and eventually artificial intelligence that will help make bots smarter.