The future of using technology to build relationships

• Technology and the role it plays in our lives is evolving everyday.
• While we have come through the Google and social era, the next phase is going to be about getting things done through assistants.
• Shane Mac, SVP of Marketing & Partnerships, Conversocial & Avishai Sharlin, Division President of Amdocs Technology write about the role technology will play in the future, to help build relationships.

While we have been using technology from the past 20 years, the complete reformation is still to come. Till now we have been experiencing phases of technology. First, technology phase was to search for the ability to find anything in the world and organize that. That was the ‘Google Era’. Then it was the ‘Social Era’ that got us all on the social media platforms and people were able to connect with their old friends, relatives sitting at the other corner of the world. The next will be about getting things done, the ‘Assistant Era’ as the internet now has the power of predicting your action, habits, and therefore it can anticipate what consumers want. It can accordingly start doing things together with IoT and connected devices. This is the biggest technology era that no-one had ever imagined, an era where the work would be done by devices.

Artificial intelligence-based technology solutions like, Siri, Alexa and Google Assistant are pouring all their capital, as APIs have been building to expose them to mobile apps. With this, the future of mobile apps will be diminished, however, the digital infrastructure is being set to force every individual in the world to build API & to expose all their systems.

“As we are exposing all the systems in the world to Alexa, Google Assistant & Siri, or the other voice assistants we haven't thought of yet, people can now talk to all those systems. While giving a voice command to these systems/devices, language is tying together all these systems in the world that don't talk to each other.”

While we are becoming connected with devices and technologies, we are gradually disappearing from social connections. All that we are doing right now is staring at our devices all day, every day and not interacting with social beings. At dinner tables as well almost every family member from each segment of age groups is engrossed in their smartphones or watching TV rather than interacting with each other after the day-long activities they must have done individually, inside or outside homes.

The next phase of technology will be built to ‘get us off technology’. Relationships can now be formed, grown and built through mediums online. And this is what exactly that has happened due to this pandemic. After being well equipped with devices and data, people still realized the need to step out of homes, interact with friends and family members. Family members who had in ages never spoken to each other took time to interact over social media, Zoom video calls celebrating birthday parties, anniversaries or usual day chats!

Similarly, businesses will have to tweak the way they communicate with consumers. 90% of the time, people are using text messages/ chatting apps to communicate with their loved ones. And there have been rare times when people visit a company’s website seeking an answer to their query. However, many get irritated talking to the chatbots or dropping emails for their queries for which usually they get automated response only. For 95% of brands in the world, the website is irrelevant. The brand should intelligently add automation to certain use cases and integrate the systems to get the work done. It's this hybrid of bots and humans together that creates a messaging experience that is the single most channel that brand should use. Marketing is turning into creating a customer experience and care is turning into a retention metric, not a cost metric.

Human behaviour studies suggest that the secret is people don't like human interaction in a business format that's transactional. Therefore, companies with the help of technologies need to build bots and technologies to provide customized & emotion-based customer service.

Disclaimer: The article is result of ‘Future of Tech’ podcast series organized by Amdocs.