How Our Chatbot Saved Our Startup

As we finalize the process of upgrading our chatbot, I would like to share some thoughts about our current chatbot, and how it helped us scale our startup from having 0 users to having thousands of users with only a team of 4 engineers who are responsible for software development, infrastructure operations and customer support.

The Current ChatBot

The current chatbot is one of the primary ways that leads and existing users use to interact with us. The current bot was deployed early when we had very few users.

Features of the exiting bot:

1. Very simple navigation
2. Answers a simple FAQ
3. No sales funnel integration
4. Takes messages when we are away

The bot was designed primarily to answer basic questions and to help a user get to customer support.

However, over the past several months our daily customer interactions have increased by more than 700%, and the time has come to upgrade our chatbot’s features.

Top Articles on How Businesses are using Bots:

1. Why Chatbots Are Key to the Future of Business Intelligence

2. Is Chatbot a synonym for great Customer Experience?

3. How Businesses are Winning with Chatbots & Ai

4. Chatbot Conference in San Francisco

Cool Features

Lets talk about some of the cool features that our chatbot has.

Daily reachable clients

Our chatbot remembers every conversation, and increases the number of reachable customers who can be retargetted through marketing messages.

Identifying Improvement Areas

The chatbot is very good at telling us which user inputs are confusing to the chatbot’s AI. This allows us to train our chatbot on confusing user inputs with the objective of improving customer engagement.

Identifying High Hit Areas

Understanding how users interact with our chatbot helps us understand which flows can be further refined to increase user engagement, satisfaction and revenue conversion.

Objectives of the Upgrades

1. Increase revenue
2. Reduce sales cycle
3. Reduce churn

Assumptions

Assumptions we are using in designing the new chatbot upgrades

1. Reducing steps in the purchase process will increase completed orders.
2. Collecting detailed customer information via the bot allows us to provide better service during live chat.
3. Providing at-your-finger-tips answers will increase customer satisfaction by eliminating live chat wait times.

The Upgrades

1. Separate flows for sales bound and support bound users.
2. Segementing within the sales flow into SMB and Enterprise flows.
3. Direct to cart shortcuts for popular products.
4. Sales Qualification Flow.
5. Chat user experience survey with +ve and -ve feedback responses so that we can collect information about where we are screwing up.
6. NPS & PMF questions at certain points during the interaction with the user.
7. Improved FAQ handling with separate flows for technical, marketing, and general questions.
8. Improved AI training to handle missed user questions.

About Us

matjaree is an early stage startup that provides a subscription based e-commerce platform for Arabic speaking merchants where they can create their stores, add their products and services and connect to payment gateways.

In closing, we are big believers that a well designed chatbot helps us increase customer engagement, reduce operating costs, and improve the scalability of user management.

Don’t forget to give us your 👏 !