It still takes a human to get the message.
Amidst the flurry of excitement around conversational bots and AI, don't forget that most interactions still require a human touch.
[IMAGE]
Messaging. Capital-C Conversational Commerce. Assistant-for-X. Bots forged in an alphabet soup of AI, ML, and NLP. App fatigue, developer ecosystems, and what can we learn from WeChat?
Messaging mania has ushered in new magazines, newsletters, and countless think-pieces; bot frameworks and tools; a swelling list of conversation-powered services; and even an integration that tells you when to drink beer.
It's easy to get lost in the wash — why does all this even matter?
Here's what you need to appreciate: the relationship between businesses and customers has always evolved. From physical locations, to the Sears Roebuck Catalogue, ordering over the phone, and now eCommerce facilitated through web and mobile experiences. Conversational commerce has the potential to be a new shift in that paradigm.
Why? Sending a message is comfortable, efficient, and ubiquitous. It doesn't require another app, just a new message through the channel of your choice (SMS, FB Messenger, WhatsApp, etc.). There may be a glut of imminent new tools and a yet determined messaging hierarchy, but fundamentally it's about talking to customers.
And we want to make those exchanges easier, more scalable, and intimate. That's why we're building Argo, a messaging-first communication dashboard for businesses. Our platform makes talking to customers more organized, efficient, and personal. We help you scale intimacy.
We're building tools for humans.
While we're bullish on the long-term potential of bots and AI, we see most of their current utility limited to narrow experiences and simple administrative tasks. That will of course change with new investment and research, more platform stability, better developer access, and increased consumer comfort with messaging-powered businesses. But for now, in most instances, it appears that humans are still king of the messaging court.
We built the first version of the Argo messaging platform out of necessity. We were operating a tutoring service over SMS, offering on-demand math help from real tutors. We needed a dashboard to handle and sort incoming requests, keep track of premium users, attach mathematical equations and graphs, add notes to student accounts, and just fundamentally stay organized and productive.
We built our own system because there was nothing on the market that worked for us. We tried using unified inbox tools, but they were designed for email/tickets and aren't good at synchronous communication. The SMS-enabled "support" tools were better, but still too rigid— we couldn't control contact information, build an automated on-boarding process, or implement our custom math-focused tools.
Even though computers are great at math, our business still relied on humans…