What businesses need to understand about chatbots

Liraz Margalit serves as customer experience psychologist for Clicktale, which helps businesses optimize visitor interactions with their websites. Welcome to the bot-centric future, which is set to make smartphone users -- i.e. almost everyone in the Western hemisphere -- navigate the internet in a chit-chat fashion with a virtual assistant. But "assistant" will soon become too impersonal… Alexa, Siri and others will cross the line from impersonal robots to entities that know our habits, routines, hobbies and interests just as well as, if not better than, our closest friends and relatives. For companies, this is a winning formula: Smartphone users have proved they are only willing to download and spend time in a limited number of apps. As such, businesses might be better off trying to connect with consumers in the apps where they are already spending plenty of time.