Sprinklr, Snaps Launch Solution to Blend Efficiency of Chatbots & Care of Human Reps

In a move that could pave the way for a new system of customer care management, Sprinklr announced this week that it has become the first social media vendor to integrate with Snaps, a conversational marketing platform.

Primarily a customer experience management solution, Sprinklr believes its new integration will help brands more easily manage the transition between automated chatbots and human agents when dealing with complex customer care questions on Facebook Messenger, Twitter, and SMS.

“We’re taking an industry-leading step to pioneer robot-human collaboration in customer care and marketing,” says Jim Tomanchek, senior director of business development at Sprinklr. “This lays the groundwork to ultimately change the way customer care works while dramatically improving conversational marketing.”

Founded in 2011, Snaps has managed to partner with top brands, including Marriott, Michael Kors, and Simon Malls. The company’s platform features authoring tools for Facebook Messenger, SMS, and Twitter, along with Slack, Google Assistant, and Amazon Alexa.

Although it’s already becoming more common for major brands to use chatbots as customer service agents, the practice isn’t without its flaws. Although 9-out-of-10 consumers say they prefer to use online messaging to communicate with brands, most chatbots lack the personal touch that’s needed to bring these types of one-on-one interactions to completion.

“There is often the notion that AI will essentially replace humans and remove any personal touch from customer care and marketing, but this simply isn’t the case,” Tomanchek says. “There are obvious advantages to integrating chatbots into what brands do, but we also cannot forget the human element.”

With its integration with the conversational marketing platform Snaps, Sprinklr believes it has found a smoother way to incorporate live agents and quickly turn bot conversations off when subject matters or customer needs get too advanced. Automatic triggers can also be set up to bring in live agent support after a customer types a designated number of characters.

Rhe new solution—dubbed Sprinklr + Snaps Agent Handoff—is already being used by a leading hotel chain. When a guest asks the hotel chain’s bot a complicated question on Facebook Messenger, an automated agent handoff is triggered, and the guest is sent to a live customer care representative. When that representative closes the ticket, another automatic handoff is triggered, which re-activates the chatbot. The guest then receives a message on Facebook Messenger to let them know they are back in the “bot experience.”

Tomanchek believes that the integration between Sprinklr and Snaps proves not only that AI and people can collaborate, but that they can do so in a way that benefits customers and doesn’t lose sight of the personalization element. He says the integration—which launched in beta last quarter and is now available widely to Sprinklr customers—creates prime potential for brands to track and manage the customer journey in its entirety online.

“This greater efficiency and insight will only give brands more power to refine the customer journey and innovate in ways that had been previously unimagined,” Tomanchek says. “The brands that use Sprinklr are among the biggest and most innovative in the world, and I cannot wait to see how they are able to take this integration to new heights.”

Stephanie Miles is a senior editor at Street Fight.