According to the Chinese zodiac, 2017 was year of the rooster. In the tech world, the biggest talking point was undoubtably chatbots. Thanks largely to Facebook wading into the market, chatbots are multiplying like, ahem, rabbits.
A lot of these chatbots are trivial examples, such as the Poncho weather chatbot. Cute, but hardly ground-breaking. However, as we're about to see, some companies are a few steps ahead and are using intelligent chatbots that actually add to the bottom line.
The three common types of chatbots used in commerce
Before we look at some examples, it's helpful to categorise three types of chatbot used in commerce. We like how CEO of SF AppWorks, Andrew Greenstein, groups them:
The personal curator chatbot helps customers find products they're looking for (which they'd normally have to navigate a website to find). Instead they tell the chatbot what they're after, and the bot asks questions to narrow down the search.
The in-store chatbot augments the physical shopping experience, allowing customers at brick-and-mortar locations to message the bot from their phone.
Customer service chat bots deal with hundreds of customer service requests common to most service based businesses. These bots can tackle an array of service calls from start to finish - providing information, tracking deliveries and performing automated changes to orders.
Now let's look at some real life examples:
Dominos Anyware
Industry: Food, Purpose: Helping customers order pizzas from almost anywhere
Pizza aficionados Dominos have risen out of their deep pan ashes. Domino’s stock was worth just $3 around November 2008. As of March 1 2017, its worth $188 per share. This rebirth was partly thanks to “Dom” - the bot described as “an artificially intelligent customer whiz designed to help superfans get their No. 1 fix of cheesy food heaven.”
While many businesses are barely out the gates when it comes to chatbots, Domino's have gone the whole hog offering access to their chatbot service across text based and voice based devices. You can even order a pizza via your car (provided it's got all the tech) or smart TV.
That's some dedication to getting a pizza to you, come rain or shine. Go Dominos!
Boom! By Cindy Joseph
Industry: Retail (Beauty), Purpose: Converting abandoned cart shoppers
Beauty retailer 'Boom! By Cindy Joseph' uses a combination of chatbots and Facebook Ads to reengage e-commerce shoppers who abandoned their cart.
This tactic has reduced cost per acquisition by around 30%.
This is how it works:
1. a shopper adds an item to their shopping cart, but leaves the e-commerce store without purchasing (a common occurence on e-commerce stores)
2. to get the shopper to complete the purchase, a Facebook Ad pops up in their Facebook page with a 10% discount (the retailer already knew they were interested - i.e. they got to the check out page - so giving them a 10% discount usually tips them over the edge to purchasing the item).
3. once they click on the 'send message' button to claim their discount, a chatbot then manages the conversation.
4. The results: The open rates are over 96% and click through rates over 55% resulting in an uplift in sales (reducing cost per acquisition by a staggering 30%!)
If you want to go deep into this strategy, I suggest you watch this video where Ezra Firestone (the guy behind this strategy) explains how it all works.
Mezi Chatbot
Industry: Travel, Purpose: booking flights, hotels and dining
One industry that is a prime candidate for 'botification' (a term we coined for businesses or processes that a bot could do) is the travel industry.
Mezi is at the forefront of this with it's AI driven chatbot. According to their website, Mezi is capable of automating more than 60 percent of the conversations initiated by travelers across travel verticals like flights, hotels and dining.
They've also partners with travel brokers Sabre, Expedia, TripAdvisor and Priceline.
Summary
So there we have it. Three companies, each in very different sectors, all using AI-driven chatbots to not only serve their customers better, but to increase sales.
How could you use chatbots in your industry? What part of your customer acquisition journey could be improved by introducing some automation?
