Cannes Lions

BotBot

R/GA SAN FRANCISCO, San Francisco / REPLY.AI / 2017

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Overview

Description

A conversational user interface to make building a chatbot as simple as having a conversation about it. This allows easy, free access to chatbots for thousands of small businesses, helping them engage with their customers.

This simplicity of user experience is achieved by building and tidily packaging the backend technology and user strategy into an accessible, Facebook Messenger-based interface. There are three notable systems being integrated:

1. A backend system that captures and delivers data for the full experience

1. Third party data services already in use by the business

2. Facebook Messenger, which captures data from the small business owner during setup, delivers data for consumer interactions, and captures consumer responses back into the backend system.

This all happens in the background, so business users can easily create a chatbot without technical and experience strategy expertise.

Execution

All experience elements listed above were designed as an integrated system. The marketing site establishes the brand, with subtle elements like the avatar in Messenger extending the system throughout the experience. In addition, a private site was built for business owners to view analytics and optimize the consumer experience. The design is based on the simplicity and playfulness of the brand, with all elements being digital. Focusing solely on the unique platform of BotBot, the conversational design was an experimental process to craft Messenger exchanges that served the brand and the intended utility of the experience. There is no cost, no expertise to build, and the Messenger interactions are largely automated, so the scale of BotBot is hoped to be boundless.

Outcome

Reply.ai extended their offering to all businesses, not just large enterprises, and in BotBot has a complementary extension of their brand. Consumers now have expanded options for interacting with their favorite brands. BotBot provides focused interactions so consumers can easily find important information and make quick purchases. BotBot has launched in the US and is freely accessible for any business. Businesses using BotBot enter a tier of technological and cultural progressiveness that they may otherwise have been inaccessible. BotBot soft-launched on March 17, with promotion forthcoming in mid-April, so no sales results at time of submission are yet available. However, with the foremost target of BotBot being easily and freely accessible chatbots for small businesses, the results are compelling. A process that used to takes months, now takes less than three minutes. The expense has been reduced from six figures to zero figures.