The average millennial exchanges 67 text messages per day and 95% are read within 3 minutes of being sent. Text messaging is a trend that’s not fading and companies who accelerate mobile engagement in their marketing initiatives will see an increase in sales.

Although mobile tools have been at marketers’ disposal for years, most struggle to produce enough content to support actionable experiences at scale. The following predictions for 2018 address why companies will be spending their marketing and customer service budgets on mobile engagement for gathering data and why they won’t wait for AI to perfect natural language capabilities in messaging to utilize in sales.

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1. Communication platforms will be a top player in gaining actionable data on customers.
Chatbots provide a higher level of interaction and contextual knowledge to learn about a customer’s needs and intent, in other words, gather actionable data about a customer, that sharpen timely recommendations and increase sales. In 2018, companies will focus their marketing and customer service budgets on context-aware communications that will be measured by the value it’s delivering to provide smart data and real-time communications.

2.Enterprise IT won’t wait for AI technology to perfect its natural language processing capabilities.
Once initial human-like interaction has been established, deeper engagement and business transactions will be handled by micro/instant apps, using more transaction-efficient interfaces. Natural language processing through AI is not optimized for the collection of structured data, such as signatures or filling out forms or credit card information. Companies won’t wait for AI to perfect this but will integrate solutions that help with the seamless handoff between natural AI conversations and the use of micro/instant apps, delivered in the messaging channel with no friction, to collect more complex data.

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