The changes to EU data privacy laws (aka GDPR) coming into effect on the 25th May, along with recent Facebook data leakage issues, has thrust data into the spotlight making it a talking point at board rooms and dinner tables across the land.

Not since the turn of the millenium have we witnessed such a degree of mad scrambling for information. As is often the case, in times of mass ‘knowledge hysteria’ we’re all seeking answers.

“Is that complaint?”, “are we allowed to do that anymore?”, “what happens if we do X?”, “how big are those fines?”.

The problem is one of human resources: there are just too few people with the relevant knowledge and experience to field all the questions.

We (that’s Botskill) figured it was high time technology — namely AI — helped us out.

So we’ve build ‘GDRP Bot’ which gives you the best advice on the subject of GDPR and compliance.

The knowledge has been accumulated from dozens of sources across the web — including the BBC, ICO (The Information Commissioners Office) and EuGDPR.org among others. GDPR Bot will save you hours of time spent web browsing looking for answers.

The bot is available on Skype for now, with more channels to follow.

To get started follow these steps (…and before you wonder, yes our bot is GDRP compliant. Just type ‘right to erase’ and hit ‘yes, erase my data’ and you’ll be anonymous again).

Remember this is an education bot and in no way constitutes legal advice (disclaimer over):

Step 1: Open the link and hit ‘Add to Contacts’

Step 2: Hit ‘Open ‘Skype’ in the pop up

Step 3: Finally, click ‘add to contacts’ and you’re done

Ask GDRP Bot a question!

Ready? Here’s the link: https://join.skype.com/bot/b8fbe79b-ff4b-480a-9dd4-63cba871bd8f

Struggling with GDPR? Try our chatbot. was originally published in Chatbots Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

As we embark on a new era of computing, advances in artificial intelligence and natural language processing are bringing conversational interfaces to the forefront.

Conversation and ‘chat’ has been around for some time, but all indicators point to conversation being the way we conduct a lot of the business we’ve normally done via websites and apps.

For one simple reason: Conversation is easier.

Let’s take an example. Ever ordered a pizza online? No, neither have I, but allegedly 40% of Domino’s customers do.

The selection process entails going to their website and choosing from a series of options — size, crust, sauce, toppings, etc.

Domino’s have created their own chatbots for ordering pizza, which helps to highlight the difference between a website versus chatbot based ordering experience.

Their chatbot ‘Dom’ does everything you can do on their website, but the interaction is conversational.

There are a few things to note here.

For a start, as it’s a conversation, the bot needs to use certain conversational cues that the customer would expect, such as:

• uses short, question based phrases
• keeps the language colloquial with phrases like “okay, what toppings would you like on that?”.
• constantly summarises the order to clarify what has been ordered so far (“I’ve got a medium 12” handmade pan pizza with…”).

In many ways it mimics the experience of speaking to a Dominos sales assistant.

How hard can designing for conversational interfaces be?

While on the face of it, creating these chatbot capable of conversation seems straight forward, they do in actual fact need a lot of consideration. Its all too easy to confuse, annoy (or bore the customer) the user.

As stated in this great video from google (below):

“In a typical conversation person A begins by sending a signal to person B, which is acknowledged by eye contact, a nod etc. Both parties work together to construct meaning based on a shared framework for understanding the world.

As they interact, they constantly play back what they’re hearing and compare it to their original intention to make sure the conversation is still on track.

Seem’s easy but it isn’t. We’ve had a hundred thousand years to master the subtleties of verbal conversation, versus the mere decades we’ve had to teach machines the same.”

How about conversational design for voice devices?

So how about voice based bot conversations (using Amazon’s Alexa, for example)?

How do they differ versus text based exchanges?

Well, as with text-based conversation, voice-based conversation has it’s own particular conventions and nuances.

A couple we’ve noticed already are:

• Understanding: With text-based chat you have the messaging app window to refer back (so you can check what was just said by your ‘voice assistant’). With voice-based conversation, you’ll have to remember what the bot just told you. As a consequence, voice-based conversation will tend to come in shorter spurts of conversation.
• Timing: With text-based chat conversations, dialogue is timed to create a smooth delivery of messages. Voice will have to be much more careful. Too fast, and you’ll lose the user, too slow and you’ll frustrate (and probably bore) them.

There’re be many more nuances as voice based conversation becomes ‘a thing’.

Summary

As we’ve seen designing for conversation has a lot of challenges, but the benefits to the business and consumer are potentially enormous.

Done right, they give the user a super engaging, easy and quick experience to getting what they want, while the business can scale it’s support without the cost of human overhead.

Conversation: The New User Interface was originally published in Chatbots Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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. I 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 super fans get their №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!

Try it here > https://anyware.dominos.com/

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.

Try this chatbot > https://mezi.com/

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?

This article was originally published on Chatamo blog

How 3 Forward-Looking Companies Use Chatbots to Improve Sales was originally published in Chatbots Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

So where are they distributed?

For the large part, they’re in the hands of big businesses with deep pockets and the resources to build and deploy them. Chatbots are exorbitantly expensive to procure and most small businesses haven’t the appetite or money to even consider them. That’s if they even know what a chatbot is (but that’s a separate issue entirely).

But here’s the kicker: small businesses are precisely the type of business that could benefit from chatbots.

Emma Jones, founder of Enterprise Nation (a trade association for small to mid sized businesses) makes a valid point that technology can enable SMEs to (even) compete with large businesses:

‘Big firms have the resources to invest in the latest digital e-commerce and m-commerce functionality, SEO, marketing, and everything in between. Smaller firms have been slower on the uptake over the years, and seem to have less appetite for it. They are busy simply running the business and don’t always see the benefits that digital can deliver. And yet the digital world is an area that they absolutely can compete with larger firms on.’

So how could chatbots help a small business out?

While customers are the lifeblood of any business - regardless of its size - small businesses have a disadvantage because they have to do everything themselves on a shoestring. At any one time, a small business owner wears multiple hats: buyer, seller, marketer, customer support, etc.

Chatbots aren’t about to start creating business strategy (yet, anyway) but where they can help with is customer support.

A chatbot allows a business to automate a lot of it’s day to day questions and answers. Commonly asked FAQs that either reside on a companies website or in the business owners head can be built into a chatbot and then made available 24/7 for customers to interact with.

To be workable for a small business, any solution has to do the following:

• a simple and intuitive drag and drop interface for creating chatbots — small business owners shouldn’t need to be tech wizards to build bots.
• be cost effective — small businesses have to watch the pennies.
• deployable on multiple channels — to be competitive businesses need to be on multiple channels, not just one. That’s where their customers are.
• let’s not forget voice. Amazon’s Echo voice device was the biggest selling item over last Christmas — there should be a way for businesses to be present on voice devices too.
• the bot should be deployable across multiple channels, but managed in one central nerve centre. Business people don’t have the time to be bouncing from one platform to the next. A single interface to manage their chatbot data is a must.
• in today’s global economy, a businesses best customers may live in other countries and speak different languages. The bot should be able to translate conversation as well as present analytics around customer interaction.

All this may sound like chatbot utopia, but it always seems impossible until it’s done (to quote Nelson Mandela).

The solution we’ve built and about to launch is called Chatamo and does all the above. Head on over to our blog and sign up to our mailing list.

In the meantime, check out Fred:

Why It’s High Time Small Businesses Got Their Hands on Chatbots was originally published in Chatbots Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I read a remarkable statistic today. 20% of a knowledge workers week is spent looking for information, according to a McKinsey report. According to their study (the social economy) social media can reduce the time employees spend searching for company information “by as much as 35 percent”. Being a champion of enterprise social networking in big business I am constantly looking to capture the business benefits. Increasing employee productivity could be a great ‘carrot’ to senior leadership who often dismiss social networking as a drain on time, not a saver of it. How plausible is this claim then?

First things first. Some degree of time is undoubtedly wasted in big business looking for information, it would be hard to refute that. Regardless of the exact percentage, anyone with experience in working for large organisations knows the challenge of information gathering across large and often silo’d parts of the organisation. Many companies have mantras along the lines of ‘if only we knew what we knew’ for good reason — the answers to their own questions are usually locked within it!

That knowledge is often locked away in someone’s head, in a deeply buried email thread or tucked away in an obscure file server or intranet page — and the means of seeking out the person who can help or ‘that file which explains x’ is practically a dark art. Employees who have been around longest usually have the best chance of knowing who to speak to or where to go, but as for a new starter it can prove near impossible. And when you take large multinationals with employees who are dotted around the world, in vertical reporting structures, often speaking different languages, what I call the ‘needing-knowing gap’ gets even more problematic.

This isn’t through any lack of good-will or wanting to hold back knowledge. It’s simply the fact the systems in place are not up to the task of facilitating this knowledge exchange. And certainly not at a organisation-wide level. It is often cited there needs to be a ‘culture’ of sharing in place too. This is also true, but I suspect all the right culture in the world will make no difference unless there is the capability (i.e. the platform) to allow this to happen.

When one thinks about the outside world, it’s strikes me that information exchange works incredibly well. Just think about Google. Within seconds of typing a simple ‘how do I…’ question you are confronted with a endless list of useful reference points. Someone has had the exact same question you now have, posted it on a help forum or similar and found the answer. In this case Google directs you to that conversation. ‘Can’t we just have a google for my business’ is one common demand made by business leaders. Well, they have a point!

As things stand, there are various reasons why a Google for business is a complex proposition. Not wanting to completely rule out Google venturing into the internal business search space (Facebook just announced last week it’s plans to launch a ‘Facebook at work’ so anything is possible) — but one significant reason behind Google’s success is the fact there are literally billions of pages being updated simultaneously, each in competition to appear as high up on your search results ranking as possible. Businesses can’t compete with this — they don’t have the time or resource to be updating pages even if a search engine like Google with it’s intelligent algorithms were ‘pointed’ internally.

Fortunately that isn’t necessarily a show stopper. One thing can and does plug this gap: an internal social network. Social networks when set up in the right way can be as good a way (if not better) of facilitating people helping other people find information and answer questions.

As to whether 35% of an employee’s time can be saved per week, that is another matter, and presumably some industries would benefit more than others depending on how much information gathering goes on. A considerable amount of time is spent searching for information though. Businesses tackle the needing-knowing gap in a variety of ways, many attempting to catalogue and categorise information in a myriad of different (and often unsuccessful) ways.

Social networks on the other hand are relatively simple, organizationally ‘flat’ environments and can very simply provide a solution for the needing-knowing gap. The key ingredient is of course that which most businesses have an abundance of = People. And the great thing about People is they tend to like helping each other.

Gerard Richardson is a digital collaboration lead for a leading consumer goods company. Follow him to hear more of his musings on enterprise social networking and more…

Earlier in the year Yammer Co-Founder and CTO, Adam Pisoni, delivered an opening keynote about the impact of disruptive technologies on business. He argued innovative technologies are becoming so ubiquitous that there’s no longer much of a competitive advantage to just having it — and that specifically the new competitive differentiator is an organization’s ability to work differently in order to take advantage of the technology it already has.

Exactly what ‘working differently’ means will vary from company to company, depending on what it is your business does. Sadly, social networks are often put in place without any real thought going into how they are to be used. This often results in the perception that social networks are little better than a Facebook for business and largely a waste of time. The term ‘social’ in this context only compounds the issue!

Gartner prediction for 2015 isn’t easy reading either. They predict a massive 80% of all enterprise social networks will fail — that’s only 1 in 5 social networks expected to succeed. So why is the fail-rate so high? Let’s take a look…

Gartner argues the shockingly low rate of adoption is due to ‘inadequate leadership and an over-emphasis on technology’. Leadership engagement and reliance on tech are often in the frame for poor performance. And for good reason some of the time. What is often the culprit though is a failure on behalf of the business to articulate what social is going to be used for. Too often we talk about how the trend towards social is all-pervasive (‘look whats happening on the outside’ we say) and reason what’s happening outside must have a role to play on the inside. However if a business fails to articulate exactly how social networking is going improve or remove business ‘pain points’ then the network quickly loses its reason for being and quickly descends into a place to ‘say hi’ and never return!

To the question of leadership engagement, of course having your leaders understand the value social networking can bring to the company is important. But senior leadership don’t necessarily need to be actively contributing by joining in conversations and outwardly demonstrating participation. Deloitte’s CEO Giam Swiegers reads their All Company feed at least every other day to keep a finger on the pulse of his organisation, which is obviously a great thing to have happening in your network. But success isn’t reliant on the CEO or any other senior leader actively participating. This isn’t a must have for successful adoption (in fact there is a certain line of argument that says too much senior engagement can actually be fatal). Success isn’t about senior leadership participation per se, rather success lies in getting down to ‘brass tacks’ and addressing real business problems, regardless of seniority or involvement of leadership.

Much is also said about the need for an ‘open and transparent’ culture for success. Indeed it’s often said that the most effective social networks are the ones where a culture of openness is already in place. (Paradoxically, the introduction of an social network is often the the catalyst that brings about an open and transparent culture! How else did the company converse previously?) The question shouldn’t be whether we need an open and transparent culture for success, as that will come about as a by-product of having the network in place. The question needs to be ‘how is our network going to address our real business problems?’.

So, what do we need to do?

• Strive to understand the pain points in your business. Speak to people and seek to comprehend existing processes that don’t work — understand why they don’t work and be creative about how your social network can offer a solution. Don’t try force-fitting a solution either. If your solution isn’t an improvement on what’s already in place, it won’t take off.
• Strive to understand what people are already doing on your network (if you have one in place already). Owing to the nature of social networks they are relatively easy to start using. The entrepreneurial people in your business will already be giving it a whirl. Seek them out, speak to them, understand what they are trying to do, and help them. Chances are you have advice that can help them. You’ll also learn from them. You need to sniff out these rumblings and speak to these people.
• Don’t worry about bringing everyone along with you. Follow the energy, some people and departments will be excited by the prospect of using social networks, others wont be. That’s fine. Embrace the early adopters and gather pace with them. Once your successes materialise, take those examples, write them up and share them back into your network. Success breeds success.
• And remember the dancing man. That is you! You need to lead by example, and that means not just talking the talk but actively living in the social network. Plugging yourself in and ‘being everywhere’ as much as humanly possible - becoming your companies social networking go-to-person. Like the dancing man, in subtle ways people will start to imitate what you do. Give it a try, and remember you may look and feel silly to begin with, but in time a legion of followers will join in!

Gerard Richardson is a digital collaboration lead for a leading brewing company. Follow me on Twitter to hear more of my musings on enterprise social networking…