Snapchat users following beauty retailer
A series of videos saved to its “Story” demonstrated exactly what it is you can do on this other platform so heavily favored by US teens. That might sound somewhat counterintuitive, but you can bet doing so managed to migrate a great number of followers accordingly.
Sephora, for reference, is strong on Snapchat. Seemingly, it’s looking like it’s figured out Kik too, and it’s doing so by using a chatbot, rather than humans to feed its communications.
So how does it work? Instigating a chat with the brand results in a series of instant responses from the off: “Hi Rachel, welcome to Sephora!” reads the first. “Get makeup tips and reviews by chatting to us,” so goes the second, accompanied by a series of relevant emojis.
The one that counts however: “Do you want to take short quiz so we can get to know you?” So follows prompts that pop up above the keyboard finding out your age, makeup brand preferences, and particular product type you can’t live without.
From there, it’s able to serve up relevant content including how-to videos and product reviews. Interested in face contouring? There’s a series of image-based application guidelines to devour, as well as specific insights tailored to your facial shape (which you again answer from some pop-up prompts). The same goes for hair, nails, lipstick and more.
Kik has 275 million users, who spend upwards of half an hour per session in the app. Its core market is Generation Z, or younger millennials, who do indeed feel at home with such chat interactions. Sephora's aim is then to convert them into paying customers too.
With each of the tips provided therefore, come product suggestions that you can click to directly shop without having to leave the app – Sephora’s mobile site merely pops-up on top of it.
That move is part of a trend that Chris Messina, developer experience lead at Uber, coined “conversational commerce”, in a must-read blogpost earlier this year. Beyond human-to-human dialogue, it’s bots that enable this to occur at scale.
As messaging apps grow in popularity and greater services become integrated (on the likes of WeChat and
WeChat is indeed heavily invested in bots as a result, while Facebook Messenger is expected to announce similar steps at its next developer conference in April too.
Sephora’s interactions feel very much as though they’re coming from a computer at present – the answers automated based on the choices you make, as opposed to a more “intelligent” bot able to pick-up on natural language. But as Messina explains, that is only set to improve over time: “Computer-driven bots will become more human-feeling, to the point where the user can’t detect the difference, and will interact with either human agent or computer bot in roughly the same interaction paradigm.”
For the time being, a mixture will exist – as with the way in which fashion brand Everlane uses Facebook Messenger at present. But watch this space for an uptick in personalized communications with chatbots over the next few months (the more you share, the better it to eventually get) and a potential new growth attribution line for retail sales as a result.
