How we turned an internal chatbot to a profitable business
We always wished there were more hours in a day and less task to do. We always wished there were better ways to check our progress. The one in which takes less time.
The best companies are those that pay attention to what is happening inside. Who is working on what, detecting bottlenecks, setting up reminders for crucial events, making sure nothing goes down.
We surround ourselves with smart people to tell us what we should be doing next. It takes a ton of effort for finding important detail and make an appropriate decision.
Executives for decades have relied heavily on Personal Assistant to run errands. A personal assistant knows in’s and out of the company. He may not have the cognitive ability to asses the situation and make a decision but he clearly can provide you with the key information that in turn can help you make better decisions.
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Why do people Hire Personal Assistants?
In the primitive world, Personal Assistants was about someone you trust to keep track of your time, taking notes, scheduling meetings, and running errands. An assistant is someone that completes tasks the managers professionally. They are known to free up your time. It takes a part of a manager’s work life and makes it a little better.
Those Hollywood movies depict it better, “Rachel, What’s my schedule for Wednesday?” “How many employees are on leave?” “What was our revenue last month” and so on. Now, Rachel does not have the capacity to do complex maths nor advice on what you should do. Her job is to provide you with information asked, pick it from a relevant resource and supply. Also, remind you of the things that are important to you.
Businesses understand that keeping personal assistant lets you focus on things that matter. Apple and Google are the prime examples for giving the luxury by providing every user with their own virtual assistant; Siri and Google Assistant.
Virtual Assistant is similar to a personal assistant, just lacks the human touch. Enough of talking about what is a virtual assistant and why do company use it. I’m not here to fill on the internet with content that has already been written by thousands of authors.
I’m here to talk about what we made over the past few months and why we think this is going to change how companies work or at least talk about the experience about clients after using our invention.
Like it or not, we all love convenience. Convenience is the reason agencies exist. There are people out there who make money filling applications, booking flights, setting up a business on your behalf. All of which could’ve been done by you.
When I was looking for Universities for my master’s program. I took the help from an agent to apply. Something I could have done on my own, but I didn’t want to spend my time filling forms, sending transcripts, and all the trivial part of admission processing. So, I hired an agent and I must confess, he did his job well and let me focus other tasks. In a way, he did provide me ease in the admission processing.
We are in the space of chatbots. This is what we do for our living. We create bots for our clients. Great bots that sit of a messenger, telegram or a website. Creating chatbots involves the same process as creating any other software. We need developers, testers, designers and a product manager. These key people are responsible to perform their task assigned to ship out a bot that our client wants.
To ensure the process runs smoothly we much like any other company rely on product development tools like Jira, Trello, and Slack. These tools assist us in achieving productivity and keeping things in order. It makes your life uncomplicated.
We follow the agile principles of Scrum and Kanban. Practically, for us, this means we carry out our work in sprints, where we split up the implementation of new features into projects running for 2 weeks at a time. In turn, each project has developers paired up and made responsible for shipping the new features within those 2 weeks. The pairs deploy their work continuously, based on a predefined Jira backlog.
We love slack and all of our team communication is based on it. All of our engineers, managers are on it.
Since we use Jira to handle issues and product development, we searched to install a chatbot that let us assign Jira tasks in the slack itself, cause it’s 2018 and switching tabs aren’t so cool. We did find few and decided to go with the most famous, cause why compromise when it is for free.
When I told my team we can now run commands like “create a task for blahblah in the project haha.” on slack. They got excited! Unfortunately, our exuberant was met with the harsh reality of bot inefficiency. We didn’t give a much thought to it. We only choose to add a bot to avoid lone wolfers have a pass. Teamwork is a significant part of finding a productive workflow, and we want to ensure that is hanging in the right balance.
However, running a bot company ourselves (BotHook) we thought it would be a good idea to create a slack bot that helps in creating, assigning and performing a few other functions right within slack since other options aren’t living up to the hype.
We rolled our slack chatbot integrated with Jira internally. We enabled AI with the help of Dialog flow. This time our team surprisingly loved it. Internally, it was cool to check on the project progress by asking the bot. Every time our member was asked a question the bot wasn’t able to process, we trained it.
One day while talking to a client regarding a different project, he advises us to follow agile methodology since they follow it too. I asked what are the tools they use in their company? his answer struck up a eureka moment. “Jira and Slack” I quickly told we have something built which we have been using for the past few days internally and if he would be interested to try it. We saw a productive boost and was wondering if other companies will experience the same. He cheerfully agreed.
We wanted to know if our client would capture similar measurements like ours. Guess what? Since their team used heavily slack, they were able to let go of the Jira interface entirely. In our next meet, he wanted to add a few more features to the bot and was willing to pay for it. Controlling Servers using Ansible and Creating and Monitoring Jenkins job in the chatbot. Our client is a big corporation that runs many servers and for managers to keep track of jobs running or idled is tedious work. We Obliged!
When we shipped the product to them, we realized we have had created a bot that basically handles most of their company operations. On multiple occasions, I got to encounter people who were using slack for their team communication. I pitched in our product and they went ahead and tried out and praised for the brilliance of productivity it has brought in to their organization.
Our internal product was now being used by few of our clients and acquaintances I know. It dawned on me that maybe there are many people out there on the internet who would love to use what we have created.
A Virtual Assistant for your Company. Assisting you to overview your projects and servers by simply asking the bot. Testimonies from our users about the advantage of the bot instilled confidence in us that may be a lot of companies who use team messenger for communication needs it.
With that said, We are launching to the public a generalized version of the bot. To ensure we have a good number of people behind us wanting it. We want you to visit Friday and drop your name in the waitlist. Twenty random users will get Friday for Free Lifetime.
