• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, March 7, 2017

LiveWorld on Tuesday began rolling out a service for brands that want to launch a chatbot on Facebook Messenger in real-time, but lack the resources to get started.

The service proceeds through strategy, planning and development stages to set up a chatbot. It also includes a service to monitor customer engagement around the clock and integrate the data into the brand's CRM and help desk applications.

The new services support the software as a service package, Enterprise Conversation Management Platform, announced in October 2016, which enables the chatbot to hand off difficult requests to a human when needed to complete the task.

Some clients already know what they need, but the services package includes a social audit to analyze the competition, LiveWorld founder Peter Friedman tells Search Marketing Daily.

Friedman says that typically, brands get the big idea, but when they attempt to put together the strategy they stall out.

"A lot of brands don't know whether to write a chatbot or go to a third party for help," he said.

Friedman, who loves to say the word "chatbot," said LiveWorld's working with a handful of companies to support the services. He expects those companies to release their chatbots in the second quarter of 2017.

Forrester Research defines chatbots as a conversational interface using voice, text or images that helps people complete tasks through conversation. Forrester suggests the ability to hand off tasks from chatbot to human to complete a request if needed is one of the basic requirements for success.

"AI is not ready to work miracles or generate magical experiences for customers on its own," Forrester Analysts Michael Facemire, Julie Ask, and Andrew Hogan wrote in the report Chatbots 101: Building Conversational Interfaces. "AI-based chatbots are like seeds: you plan them, but then you need to feed them with high volumes of customer interactions so they grow."

Today LiveWorld works with brands to run chatbots on a host of social channels such as Facebook Messenger, and Twitter, but Friedman expects to expand to other channels or sites "with some interesting twists."