BLOCK71 Singapore Entrepreneurs Feature — Conversations with a Chatbot Creator!
BLOCK71 Singapore speaks to Victor Lysenko, the CEO of Osome, a service that helps entrepreneurs start and run a business in Singapore by providing accounting, payroll, secretary and other services via a chat-like application, on his thoughts on chatbots!
Here’s a brief bio of Victor: Victor is a serial entrepreneur and angel investor and as a co-founder and CEO Victor led several companies from inception to acquisition by industry leaders. In 2015, he was one of the winners of the Entrepreneur of the Year award presented by World Finance.
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1. What is Osome and how did the idea behind it come about?
Osome is a versatile administrative service for entrepreneurs, helping you with bookkeeping, corporate affairs, obligatory filings, expenses, payroll and other inescapable and boring duties. We’ve been running various businesses for many years and this idea naturally came to us as we have had first-hand experience with these administrative tasks. It is especially painful when you are in a start-up mode, bootstrapping with limited resources and time, focusing entirely on your customers, your product and your team.
While we were thinking about the best way to do it, the idea of using chat crossed our minds. It seemed obvious because we use mobile phones and messengers all the time.
2. Can you tell us a little about building chatbots and what are some of the challenges in marketing them?
When we first started, we looked around and saw an emerging ecosystem of tools and platforms for building chatbots and it has really encouraged us. Over time we’ve realised that these tools and platforms are often very limiting, inflexible, and don’t work well together. We had to invest a lot of time and resources into areas like NLP, conversational contexts, chatbot memory, UX, human takeover algorithms, analytics and put it all together to create a really good product.
In terms of marketing, we don’t see this to be different compared to any other product. As long as the chatbot is delivering value to the customer, it will be in demand. In our case, the bot is built into the mobile app, so primarily, we market the app and the service itself.
3. How can chatbots deliver value to their users?
Osome provides services that are in high demand, and there is an existing established market in which the same services are offered in a very inefficient and old-fashioned way. Chatbots add value to our users in three ways. First of all, messaging is ubiquitous and convenient. Everyone is very familiar with messaging platforms and our users don’t need to learn how to use a new interface to start utilising the service. Secondly, with messaging you can deliver the interface “piece-by-piece” and “just-in-time”, so the user will not be overwhelmed with too many dialogue screens, unlike in a typical accounting software. Finally, we dramatically decrease the cost of service, while serving the customer much faster due to automation of many routine tasks and interactions
4. What are your insights and suggestions for bot makers to enhance a conversational flow for maintaining a successful chatbot?
The rule number one — successful chatbots solve real problems. Once you get there, make sure to write high quality texts: short, concise and in plain language. It may take a lot of iterations to get your texts right. Then ensure that users never get stuck when chatting to your bot by always giving an option to advance the conversation. Lastly, give them some human-like traits, for example, by adding some humor.
5. Besides Kik, Slack, Facebook etc, what platform that isn’t currently thought of as being for bots do you think would benefit from having chatbot support?
Many interactions can be translated into chatbots and chatbots may replace a lot of traditional graphical interfaces. We are seeing this happening in websites, e-commerce, enterprises and so on. A chat interface makes human-computer interactions simpler and more natural, so we see a big opportunity here for Osome to make our services available to a very wide population.
Specifically in terms of messaging platforms, Whatsapp is the only one that has a lot of users and remains closed to chatbots. With Facebook recently opening up Whatsapp to business accounts, we hope that the chatbot situation is also going to change in the near future.
6. Which bot do you chat with the most?
We use the Osome bot all day long :).
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