Why We Invested – Vox SEA
Conversation Matters in Building Brand Relationships
Conversational commerce has seen a variety of iterations since the term was coined in 2015. Conversations between a merchant and a company is not new, however. There are long established channels for customer support, for recommendations, to ask questions, or to complete a transaction. Industries have been created in order to support these interactions. Call centers were created to provide customer support, telemarketing (sadly) was created to drive transactions, and recently chatbots on websites will help users navigate through a product FAQ section or even basic trouble shooting.
Fast forward to today and technology is getting significantly smarter at enabling business to address all of these interactions in new ways. Call centers have seen their inbound call burden shift to messaging apps, then further reduced through the implementation of chatbots. We’ve seen integration of messaging through the full funnel from marketing to sales to onboarding.
In the early days of conversational commerce, the majority of the focus had been transactional in nature: answer a question, complete a sale, complete an action. While many areas consumer interactions solely need a transactional nature, many brands are looking for additional customer experience and build solid consumer relationships. An old survey by PWC looked at customer experience and “Friendly Service” ranked alongside “Efficiency” and “Convenience”. Technology has been able to provide on-demand services via messaging and chatbots that tackle the latter, but the former has been more elusive.
The integration of Artificial Intelligence and the advent of more sophisticated Natural Language Processing is expected to bring an further advancement in Conversational Commerce. We’ve seen technology tackle the efficiency, convenience and knowledge parameters, but we will soon see Human Interaction and Friendly Service being supplemented or partially replaced without sacrificing customer experience. To do so will require sophisticated contextualization and models that can more closely mimic the fluidity of human interactions.
A mobile-first generation with more connected devices, including voice assistance, will drive greater adoption and demand for conversational commerce via the channels that consumers are accustomed to. We can already see the data regarding the dominance in messaging apps and the shifting preference towards text-based communication. But voice will always have a strong position on a relationship and with smarter voice bots, we may see a bounce back.
We are excited to become investors in VOX SEA as they build their relationship-centric focus in conversation commerce. With a relationship-centric focus, they look to be able to establish greater brand loyalty and ultimately conversion. While they are currently focused on the F&B vertical, there are substantial opportunities for future expansion beyond F&B as they grow.
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