Business owners and service providers face an ongoing dilemma. Customers like the immediacy of talking to a customer services agent, but often prefer the anonymity of a web site. Owners and providers would like to engage each and every customer in dialogue to help build the relationship, but the cost of doing so is prohibitive. Chatbots offer a solution to this problem.

A chatbot is an application which allows users to have a natural language conversation with a computer. Used on your web site a chatbot can:

• Answer visitors questions about you, your organisation and your business
• Ask visitors questions and gather information about their needs
• Make your website more memorable, increasing return visits and referral
• Build trust and empathy, increasing loyalty and lifetime value
• Free your human staff focus on more complex tasks and enquiries

Research in the US (where chatbot use is more advanced) has shown that the average cost-per-contact using a chatbot is less than 60p, compared to over £3.50 for live text-chat or over £4 for a telephone contact.

Indeed leading analysts Forrester reported in 2010 that chatbots “offer compelling business benefits, including enhancing customer experiences, reducing live help costs, and driving cross-sells.”

Daden’s Discouse’s chatbot engine provides the ideal solution for deploying a chatbot on your web site. Discourse:

• Is web based and managed, for easy set-up and maintenance
• Can use animated avatars with text-to-speech to really engage users
• Can be accessed from mobiles, and even SMS, email and instant messaging platforms
• Accesses databases and applications to provide visitors with up-to-the-minute information
• Captures what users are looking for, so increasing customer insight
• Logs every conversation for later analysis, so that you can steadily improve the service

Chatbot projects can cost from as little as £5k to around £50k. The price as ever depends on the scope of the bot, the amount of integration involved, and the split of work between Daden and yourselves, so we can find a solution for most budgets.

If you would like to see a chatbot in action then talk to Abi on our home page. You can also read more about our chatbots, or download our White Paper - Chatbots For Customer Advantage.

Virtual Worlds offer media, retail and marketing commercial, industrial and manufacturing exercises a wide variety of opportunities to do things in a new and better way. Unlike conventional web-based eLearning, immersive learning can be both collaborative and spatial -this can be particularly important for areas like risk assessment, health and safety, point of sale where the spatial relationships can be vital to the effective execution of a task, or management of an incident. From customer service, store layout and familiarisation, point of sales, team building to health and safety, surveillance, stock flow and incident mangement they offer a safe environment where users can practice and discuss, either by themselves or as part of a team.

For real-world retailers, virtual worlds offer some unique challenges. Beyond the generic applications such as marketing, recruitment and remote collaboration, actually moving to the point where you can sell effectively through a virtual world is potentially problematic.

Pure virtual world retailers not only have few problems, but also have many advantages. Their stock is completely digital, they have no issues of raw materials, production, distribution. Even Point-of-Sale is simplicity itself, a buyers electronic wallet automatically being debited as they click on buy – and the product is delivered straight to their inventory.

Daden offers two product lines which can support marketeers, chatbots and virtual worlds.

If you would like more information about our Discourse chatbots then please call us on 0121 250 5678 or email us at info@daden.co.uk.