Marketing

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

Chatbots - Giving your web site a personality

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.

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.

The original heyday of marketing in virtual worlds was back in 2006 - many brands came in, and almost all left. The problems were two-fold: first worlds like Second Life still don't have enough users to attract big marketeers, and second worlds again like Second Life had no "voice of god", so you had to market in them in the same ways as you do in the real world. For more specific markets some virtual worlds make sense, for instance Club Penguin and Habbo Hotel, but not Second Life.

We think that this is still generally the case, and would advise against any stand-alone B2B or B2C marketing exercise in SL. However there are ways in which a virtual presence can help to extend the brand experience and maybe reach new audiences, and virtual worlds are becoming an ideal environment in which to create low cost animated video (also called machinima) which can then be used in more mainstream marketing.

If you want to know more why don't you read our White Paper - Virtual Worlds and Serious Business - A 9 Point Plan, or give us a call.