THE 14TH ANNUAL SHORTY AWARDS

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Special Project

Special Project
From the 10th Annual Shorty Awards

BotBot, the bot that builds bots

Entered in Business to Business, Chatbots

Objectives

Chatbots allow companies to improve customer service and increase sales. But, however simple they appear, building chatbots requires considerable creative and technical expertise, time, and money. These restraints make chatbots inaccessible to most small businesses.

BotBot enables small businesses to build chatbots in minutes, not months, without assistance, following these easy steps. First, utilize Facebook Messenger to build a chatbot experience, satisfying common consumer interactions like ordering food, asking common questions of a business, and booking fitness classes. Second, serve the chatbot experience itself, also on Messenger, so consumers have easy access to these high utility interactions.

In this manner, BotBot makes chatbots accessible to all small businesses, not just enterprises with the extensive resources required to build one from scratch. The chatbots deliver meaningful experiences that help serve common small business needs, enhancing customer service and growing sales.

Strategy and Execution

Utilize 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 business, helping them engage with their customers.

This simplicity of user experience is achieved by building and tidily packaging the backend technology anduser 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

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

3. 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.

Hundreds of thousands of business Facebook business pages were identified that could be offering a richer experience with chatbots on Messenger. The primary targets are small businesses and their customers who are interacting on Facebook.

Businesses are already manually interacting with their customers on Facebook. Now, they can increase the utility of these interactions by integrating more data, expand into the Messenger channel, and drastically increase scale of interactions through automation.

Results

The primary objective of BotBot is making chatbots easily, and freely accessible to small businesses. A process that used to takes months now takes less than three minutes; while the expense has been reduced from six figures to zero figures. The quantity of chatbots built and scale of interactions served on each is unknown as the platform was built on behalf of a third party, that then enables small business to directly interact with their customers via chatbot.

Media

Entrant Company / Organization Name

R/GA New York, Reply.ai

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