by Laurie Sullivan @lauriesullivan, May 12, 2017

If Microsoft’s news around Bing and Cortana coming from this week’s Build 2017 conference provides any indication of the future of artificial intelligence and chatbot technology, then LiveWorld should be sitting pretty at the other end of the table, facilitating those conversations.

LiveWorld recently expanded support for its chatbot platform from Facebook Messenger and other social platforms to Skype, Kik, LINE, SMS, and Viber, allowing marketers to engage with new audiences in targeted geographies and demographics.

The latest news comes less than two months after LiveWorld announced its support of WeChat, Telegram and web chat. It aims to provide marketers with one offering across all major digital communication platforms.

LiveWorld links customer profiles from mobile to desktop and other media, enabling brands to better track their customer engagements across social media and messaging platforms, improve their understanding of consumer preferences and follow patterns in dialogue and conversations to identify trends.

Juniper Research expects chatbots to “redefine” the customer service industry and forecasts that the technology will be responsible for a cost savings of more than $8 billion by 2022, up from $20 million this year. In fact, the success rate of bot interactions in the healthcare sector will rise from 12% today to more than 75% in 2022. In the banking sector, it should reach more than 90% in 2022.

Data will become key. Mallika Chakravarti, director of product marketing at LiveWorld, said data that is gained through interacting with the platform is made available from the company’s analytics module and accessible through a dashboard and reports, which marketers can download.

Brands can measure the engagement and interaction metrics over time as well as sentiment and topic or the popularity of a specific market or demographic segment. For instance, a brand can see that since launching their chatbot program on WeChat they had a 60% lift in engagement and 75% increase in interaction. They also can identify the most popular topic and the most negative features for consumers in the Millennial generation.

Chakravarti said brand marketers use this to improve and optimize their program, team and product and services. It allows marketers to increase promotions around one product while rethinking their approach for the other.

Since LiveWorld firmly believes in closed-loop marketing, the company recommends test and pilot campaigns so marketers can learn more about a specific channel and how it resonates with the adoptive segment and feeding that back into their programs and products and services.

“Technology, especially messaging channels, is constantly changing and audiences are constantly adapting and adopting new patterns and use,” Chakravarti said. “It only makes sense for brands to do the same.”

MediaPost.com: Search Marketing Daily

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