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AI meets customer engagement: Creepy or necessary?

A new artificial intelligence platform promises to engage diners in a caring way with very little thought and effort from restaurant operators.

July 27, 2016 by S.A. Whitehead — Food Editor, Net World Media Group

Conversational commerce, automated loyalty, chatbot —  however you refer to automatic customer engagement marketing, it basically boils down to getting a computer to talk to your diners to keep them coming back. In this digital age, it's critical that all businesses have a way of engaging customers like this online. The problem is that it takes a lot of time and manpower. 

Enter flok AI: An artificial intelligence platform or "chatbot" that is programmed to keep the conversation going with customers about your brand and how much it cares about them. (Granted, it's a little creepy if you think about it too hard, but this is business, not your family).  

This week, flok AI went live with the promise of helping even the smallest business operator handle that immense, constant and demanding task of staying social with customers in the name of business. The system allows restaurants of all sizes to launch their own chatbots to interact with customers in the name of the brand. 

In a news release about the product, the company said this is the first chatbot integration specifically tailored to local businesses, which often have problems keeping up with the social media manpower that larger brands have available to engage customers. 

"Consumer behavior and the shift toward conversational commerce are changing how the biggest brands and retailers engage their customers. We can't let local businesses get left behind," said flok CEO Ido Gaver. "We're putting enterprise-grade AI tools into the hands of local businesses, at a fraction of the cost. If you're a business competing with national chains, you now have a customizable marketing solution that will level the playing field in a matter of minutes."

The company said that bot-to-customer conversations are suited to respective business categories. For example, words like "reservation" would be used for restaurants, while "appointment" would apply to styling salons. 

The company promises that any restaurant can create its own bot in under five minutes. The result? You now have a messaging interface that can handle many common customer questions. However, if the all-knowing bot gets a query that he/she cannot handle, the message is automatically relayed to a manager or other designated individual via mobile phone for … wait for it … a real live person to answer. 

But it doesn't end there with this "chatty" bot

This is not just a reactive application, however. Flok AI can also start a conversation with customers, based on triggers, such as a customer's location,  time lapses in visits and the time of day or week. Businesses that enroll in flok AI get beacons that direct a bot's proactive outreach.

So you might think of it like a more detailed version of that reminder you put in your phone to call mom every week. It can calculate the last time any particular customer visited your location for a meal and send a message after 30 days, for example.  The company said it turns flok into an artificial intelligence marketing assistant who (or which?) can drive foot traffic into restaurants.

It remains to be seen whether we become as skeptical of these kinds of messages as we do those emails from unknown organizations that greet us by name. 

About S.A. Whitehead

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Pizza Marketplace and QSRweb editor Shelly Whitehead is a former newspaper and TV reporter with an affinity for telling stories about the people and innovative thinking behind great brands.