On-Demand Services Look To Chatbots, Live Chat

Rapidfy, an on-demand platform that connects customers with service professionals and small and medium enterprises is looking to improve how these professionals interact with customers.

The firm announced today (Sept. 20) that it will introduce artificial intelligence-powered chatbots and utilize Live Chat for websites to help foster this improved interaction.

Rapidfy’s Live Chat feature will allow customers to communicate via a service professional’s website, Facebook or the Rapidfy platform. The chats can be managed or answered in a single mobile app, and the company said additional messenger platform integrations are underway.

As the popularity of conversational commerce continues to rise, Rapidfy is also looking to use chatbots to automate more of the customer support workflow. The chatbots will use artificial intelligence to help service professionals reach and communicate with customers in an affordable way.

The move to utilize chatbots is not a surprise.

As Karen Webster explained earlier this week, the unspoken advice to digital players is that, if they’re not botting, they’re rotting. The media has declared chatbots the digital version of the little black dress: a technology staple that every brand must now have and every payment type must now commerce-enable, she explained.

Bots are seen as commerce’s next big frontier, one that Webster said can make the notion of contextual, conversational commerce real inside of the app where consumers now spend 75 percent of their time: messaging.

“The big bet is that bots will make it possible for brands to indulge the every digital whim of this group of consumers without them ever having to leave their digital home away from home,” she added.

Just last week, Facebook announced 30,000 bots would soon be payment-enabled for the 900 million users of its Messenger platform.

David Marcus, VP of messaging products at Facebook, explained that users will no longer be sent to an external website because Messenger bots will be able to facilitate payments natively, TechCrunch reported.