Conversational UX and its impact on user engagement

By 2020, an average person will converse more with a bot than with their spouse - Gartner.

While this sounded silly in 2016, it seems highly possible in 2018. AI bots have turned into extended arms of companies in Customer engagement, online sales channel, Customer support etc. Bots are also employed to make internal governance in organizations better.

The target segment for our client was pregnant women. As you well know, the engagement period is long-term which starts right from month 1 to when the baby is 5 years old. Now, keeping the customer engaged throughout this 6-year average term is quite tricky and almost impossible to execute manually. So, when we suggested we can use Artificial Intelligence powered Bots, the client did not give a second thought.

Why AI Bots?

It is easy to invent/innovate new technology, but the challenge is to make the audience adopt the new technology. The technology has to reach them via a channel they are already used to, to make the process much easier and in a shorter duration.

Millennial moms are prone to mobile phones and chat applications. With facebook messenger the most used chat application in the US, we decided to integrate our AI chatbot with the messenger application. This will help in faster adoption rate.

The period is 6 years of engagement and this implies that there is a lot of data to be handled. With an AI-powered algorithm, it helps to keep track of individual user data to not just help them choose products now but also to recommend new products at the right time. This provides automated engagement over the period.

Roadmap to Implementation

Understanding the pain points

We work in an outcome-based model, where we ensure we just don't deliver the technical solution but help the client achieve their desired outcome with the solution we provide them. Since we have been working with the client for quite some time, we had a cusp on the products and their business operation models. But before entering into the BOT implementation, we decided to go into a more detailed discovery phase to understand their complete customer journey cycle. This helped us understand their existing customer engagement process and the challenges that have to be addressed.

Ameex's own BOT platform

With the requirements gathered, we analyzed multiple numbers of BOT platforms available in the market. Any business process is complex and with nutrition, if the Bot has the freedom to suggest products to the customer, the owner has to have complete control over the functioning of the BOT. This requires high-end customization and top-notch security lines in AI algorithm. Hence, we narrowed down towards creating our own bot platform that will reduce the dependencies and pass the control baton completely to us.

Ameex AI, our own BOT platform which is modular in nature with Stanford NLP and a custom chatbot engine checked all the prerequisites we jotted. Stanford's NLP is one of the oldest languages in the market which has evolved over the time and it assists in quick learning of the AI.

The second phase of the journey is integrating the AI BOT with the Digital Experience platform. The AI BOT is designed in such a way that it can be integrated with Web, mobile, third-party applications such as messenger etc. The BOT was deeply integrated with the Digital Experience platform and was made accessible via Messenger application for chat and Alexa + Google Home for Voice access.

The Implementation  aftermath

The BOT implementation was focused towards delivering an enriched conversational User experience to their customers. The end goal is to deliver customer engagement and drive sale conversions via the bot. To test the same we launched it internally to our employees and the employees of the client and we saw staggering results with the learning curve of the AI. We integrated shopping features, which made the customer to place an order via the BOT without having to visit the website.

It turned into an advisor for the millennial moms helping them in answering their doubts on baby nutrition, sending them a personalized feed of reads for them. This revamped their entire customer support process since the employees now can answer only those questions which need human attention instead of the repetitive questions that carry a static answer.

The outcome reaped by the client

The bot helped them to standardize their customer support process helping their Support executives to be more efficient in answering only critical questions.

The bot was implemented initially for the US market and it turned to a huge hit. The session time with the bot was higher than the session spent on the website. The BOT directly interacted with their e-commerce platform and fetched the content and product list from the common database which reduced the efforts in creating alternate content exclusively for the BOT.

To localize the bot for their regional markets, the BOT was integrated with translator APIs. By this, the customer can converse with the bot in their own native language taking the conversational experience to the next level.

The BOT also provided product recommendations and answer questions on product quantity needs for the mom resulting an increase in the order value and the number of orders.

If you are interested in a Demo for the bot, contact us here.