Conversational experience
What is Conversational experience?
Conversational experience is the overall quality of a customer's back-and-forth interactions with a business carried on across digital channels — SMS, WhatsApp, RCS, web chat, email, and voice — as a continuous, contextual dialogue rather than one-way broadcasts or a form the customer fills out and waits on. It covers response speed, tone, and whether context (what the customer already said, on any channel) carries forward, and it can be delivered by a human agent, an AI agent, or a handoff between the two.
More detail
Conversational experience is broader than conversational commerce: commerce is specifically about completing a purchase in-thread, while conversational experience covers support, notifications, marketing, and commerce alike, whenever they're delivered as an ongoing two-way exchange instead of a one-off blast.
It also doesn't require AI — a shared inbox where human agents reply quickly and see a customer's full history across channels already delivers a conversational experience. Conversational AI and AI agents are one way to scale that same quality of interaction to more channels and higher volume without adding headcount.
On Orbit, conversational experience is built on omnichannel messaging (SMS, WhatsApp, RCS, email, voice) feeding a shared conversation history that both AI agents and human agents in the inbox can read from, so a customer who starts on SMS and continues on WhatsApp doesn't have to repeat themselves.
Frequently asked
- What's the difference between conversational experience and conversational AI?
- Conversational experience is the overall quality and design of a customer's back-and-forth interactions with a business, across any channel, whether handled by a person or software. Conversational AI is one specific technology that can power part of that experience — a business can also deliver a strong conversational experience using only human agents in a shared inbox, with no AI involved.
- Does a conversational experience require AI or a chatbot?
- No. It only requires that interactions happen as a two-way, contextual dialogue instead of one-way broadcasts or disconnected forms. AI agents and automation help a business scale a conversational experience across more channels and volume, but a well-run human-staffed shared inbox can deliver one too.
See also
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