Just Connect Hello Webio.

As will now be apparent to anybody who cares to listen something important but predictable is happening in the world of computing and communications. Customers have stopped downloading mobile applications, they dont want to make or take phone calls, and they dont want to be your friend on Facebook. A mobile moat surrounds your customer and there is only one way across it.

You have to be invited. The customer has to choose to connect and more and more they are choosing to do so through mobile messaging. Chris Messina is credited with naming this movement Conversational Commerce.

At Webio we believe that the enterprise is fundamentally not ready to address this shift which is more than just a shift in communications channels but is part of a deeper self service and customer empowerment movement with significant implications for customer care and call centres. With cloud platforms its now no longer a question of getting better inbound or outbound messaging capability. Its about having better conversations and of giving customers control of that conversation.

As a customer its about being in a conversation where the other person knows you so well that they finish your sentence for you, they knew exactly what choice to put in front of you, and its as simple and magical as using an Uber. At Webio its our mission to turn messaging into conversations.But before we go there, lets go back.

Its All About ConnectingThe basic function of the Internet is to connect. Its just that we are connecting to more things, connecting more of ourselves, and connecting more to each other. Because more and more people, groups, companies and services are making demands on our time, it is inevitable that the patterns of notification, messaging, and interaction are changing.

Where we are communicating is changing - when I message a friend its as likely to be over Viber, WhatsApp, or Facebook messenger than over SMS. When I want to share a picture with my family, I share it to my messenger group, not Facebook. Our new private, micro social network, in our messengers.

We are connected to more devices - we have clusters of devices, across multiple networks. They detect our heart-rates, measure our weight, track our movements. Soon we will have data from our cars, our houses, and our workplaces to integrate into our lives.

All these services not only produce data, but they want to communicate with us in some way, and we want to communicate with them. We need a new conversational interface to achieve this. We have conversations with ourselves in that we ask questions such as when do I tend to sit for more than three hours at a time?

We also interact with services that help us manage ourselves and our relations with others. For instance we may ask a service to give us a simple notification if an elderly parent is sitting for too long. We ask questions and make requests from the services in our life.

We connect with services where we expect the service to tell us things proactively. In a way these services sit in the background and only nudge us when they think its important or when its very relevant. Google Now is an example of such a service.

We may ask a fintech service to nudge us if it looks like our spending is going to cause us to miss a savings target for instance. These are examples of predictive conversations.Mobile phones are the things we carry, but its AI that commands our attention.

Services such as google Inbox automatically decide which messages should go to our inbox and which should be labelled promotions or notifications. Our communications are already being mediated by intelligent services. Soon, all the interactions between people, groups and companies will involve two way mediation between intelligent services.

Just tell me is becoming just do it. Based on an understanding of our intentions and our preferences when we ask these services questions, when we converse with them, we often want to authorise them to perform an action as well. Find me a cab, becomes book me a cab.

Experiences such as Halo and Uber reset the bar in terms of ease of use, and frankly, to me anyway, feel magical.The way we are interacting with the world around us has become too noisy. Conversations in our messaging is where customers are choosing to solve this problem.

The people behind Webio have been a little obsessed with the role of conversational design for nearly 20 years. Its only now with the widespread availability of cloud platforms, artificial intelligence, and the cultural move to messaging platforms, that it now truly possible to bring these conversational designs to life. Over the coming weeks and months we look forward to sharing that journey with you.

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