The Product Side

At last, a chat bot that is different!

Figure 1

Take a look at the screenshot above.

Do you see it?

Take a look at the bottom right of the screenshot. This is what I’m talking about:

Figure 2

A bot that does not ask you the same “How can I help you?” question, such as every other bot. How many times have you come across a sales person in a shop, asking you exactly the same thing? And most of the times, our built-in response is to say “No (you can’t help me). I’m just looking around.”.

So why take an approach that does not work well in the physical world and use it in the digital one?

Instead this bot becomes more intriguing probing if it can ask you a quick question.

So you might wonder:

• What is it going to ask me?
• Will it be interesting?
• At least it’s going to be quick so I won’t lose much time.

You see, if you respond positively to this request, then you have already committed to some minimum interaction with the bot. You will have to at least read the question, consider it and then decide how to proceed.

After pondering for a few seconds, I wanted to give it a try and go ahead.

Now, I want to mention something important here: the reason I visited the website was to see what this company are doing, after I read about them in an investment report. I was not interested in much detail, I was just trying to grasp the basics. So here I find myself, being intrigued by this commodity feature (a chat bot), so much that I decided to investigate it further and even write this post. This does not happen often.

Moving on, I click on it and expect to see the question it wants to ask.

Instead I see this:

Figure 3

No question yet! Just 5 options, that actually reflect the main reasons people visit a website:

1. “Go for it!”: this is me allowing the bot to ask me the question. Actually I was expecting the question, right away when I clicked on the bot (Figure 2), but I see that it make sense to have this button.
2. “Connect me to sales” → prospect customers
3. “I … need some help” → existing customers
4. “… interested in careers …” → prospect employees
5. “… just browsing” → everyone else (including me). This means that the bot won’t disturb me anymore.

So by this time (requiring just 1 click) the bot can forward me to the appropriate place depending on my need (see points 2,3,4 above) / continue the interaction (point 1) / or leave me alone (point 5).

Quite nice.

Since I’m now exploring its behaviour, I press on the “Go for it!” and get this response:

Figure 5

It has now turned to sales, so I’m not interested anymore and I stop the interaction.

However, I must admit this has been one of the most intriguing opening lines!