Custom Chatbot Development for a Chatbot Store / PAAS for Bot-Building

Belitsoft provides custom software development services for SaaS companies. We have experience in creating both lead capture forms to collect leads on landing pages and chatbots from scratch. Recently, we have developed a chat-bot that adapts automatically its design and “call to action” phrases to a webpage’s design and content. Belitsoft also provides customization of ready-for-use third-party commercial or open source solutions, including designing conversational interfaces. Customization is required very often because ready-for-use solutions may not be fit with your company requirements. Just compare a form and a chatbot. Source: space10-community.github.io/conversational-form/ The ideal timeframe for responding to a new lead is within the first five minutes, according to research from InsideSales.com and Harvard Business Review. Respond in ten minutes instead of five? You’re looking at a 400% decrease in your odds of qualifying a lead. Most companies lose leads. Lead Response Survey. Source: blog.drift.com A chatbot seems to be the single solution to handle this. A chatbot can respond within the first five minutes. A chatbot works 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Chatbots can answer to an unlimited amount of users at the same time. You will need less employees to answer to all the questions manually. Perfecto Mobile Replaced Traditional Live Chat With a Chatbot The company Perfecto Mobile is a SAAS product that offers suites targeting at functional, automation and performance testing respectively. The total funding amount is $84,900,000 since launch. Results The chatbot on the Perfecto Mobile's SaaS product website grew their conversion rate from 6% to 20%. That works out to nearly 4x increase in conversion rate overall. Perfecto Mobile's chatbot Process Chris Willis, ex-Chief Marketing Officer at Perfecto Mobile, was interested in being able to filter out the noise that’s associated with traditional live chat. He needed something that would let his sales development reps (SDRs) focus on having conversations with just those people who were likely to buy. "We were sitting at about a 6% conversion of our web traffic, which is about the industry standard. But what we wanted to do was increase the overall conversion rate of traffic because our traffic was pretty good," said Willis. After six months of using the chatbot, that number climbed to 20%. Chris also discovered that by letting leads “skip the form” and chat in real-time, he could reduce the time it took a lead to move through the sales funnel. "Leads that come in through chat tend to have a higher velocity. So you’re able to solve the problem or meet the needs of the request in real-time. So you think in terms of somebody coming to a website, and having a question, and filling in a contact us form. And they’ll hear back in 24 hours, or two days…that problem might not be there anymore. If they’re able to initiate a conversation, so skip the form, and have a conversation in real-time, we’re seeing that move very quickly," said Willis.  Chris then gave an example of just how quickly the sales process can move when you’re selling in real-time with the chatbot. Here’s a summary: An anonymous visitor came to the Perfecto Mobile website and started a conversation via the chatbot. Based on IP address, the conversation was routed to an SDR. The anonymous visitor turned out to be someone from a major sports brand and they wanted to meet in-person with a sales rep. During that conversation, the SDR called the sales rep and gave him all the info. Two days later that sales rep was standing in that major sports brand’s offices in New York. Drift Replaced Web Form With a Chatbot The company Drift is a SaaS-based messaging app for sales and customer success teams. Total Funding Amount: $47,000,000. Results The chatbot on the Drift's SaaS product website added 15% more leads to the top of Drift's funnel. Leads from the chatbot close more quickly: 3 days from conversation to demo. Process Erik Devaney, Brand Marketer at Drift, said that bots are integral to their sales & marketing process.  They use bots for: routing chats to the right department (e.g. sales, support), as well as to the right sales rep based on territory. responding to questions that they already have answers for in their help desk. qualifing leads in real-time, 24/7, even when all of their sales reps are asleep. They just take the questions their sales reps are already asking and turn them into a script. The chatbot pops up in the corner of their pricing page and asks, “What brought you here to check out Drift?” before continuing with a couple more qualifying questions. "Of the people who click on that message, 63%  end up starting a conversation with one of their sales reps. For comparison, the benchmark email click rate from MailChimp data ranges from 2% to 3%," said Devaney. RapidMiner Replaced Traditional Live Chat With a Chatbot The company RapidMiner is a SaaS platform for a predictive analysis. It extracts the needed data and displays results in a way that users can easily determine trends and future outcomes. The total funding amount is $36,000,000 since launch. Results The chatbot on the RapidMiner's SaaS product website now conducts about a thousand chats per month. It resolves about two-thirds of customer inquiries; those that it cannot, it routes to humans. In addition to Chief Marketing Officer, who is monitoring the tool’s interactions, two co-op college students support the inquiries part-time. Rapidminer's chatbot Process Like many software companies, RapidMiner offers free trials, and Tom Wentworth, Chief Marketing Officer at RapidMiner, was struggling to serve the approximately 60,000 users who come to the company’s site each month for the free trial. Many of the visitors using RapidMiner’s software, and needing help, are not paying anything for the service. So, how could Wentworth help them in a cost-effective way? The company had a popular chat feature on its site, but its salesforce was overwhelmed — and spending a great deal of time — sorting through the chat sessions to find potential customers. It was like looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack. Wentworth approached a friend who suggested he try a chat tool, which would ask a visitor initiating a chat, “What brought you to RapidMiner today?” The visitor would respond, and the chatbot would provide one of seven potential follow-up answers. For example, a visitor might say, “I need help,” and the chatbot would send him or her to the support section of the website. Wentworth started small, running the tool on a few of RapidMiner’s smaller web pages to test how helpful it was. In less than two weeks, he had deployed it on every page. Every day, Wentworth reviews conversations people have had with the chatbot. “I’ve learned things about my visitors that no other analytics system would show,” said Wentworth. “We’ve learned about new use cases, and we’ve learned about product problems.”

Being a professional developer is more than just coding, it means more concern about delivering a usable product in a limited timeframe. Our developer’s team was among awardees of the international Clean & Health Tech Hackathon. The team has built the MVP of the Telegram Bot for weight control (iFoodyBot). Microsoft supported their project and granted the team with $23,000 in the form of Microsoft BizPark services. Telegram is a cloud-based messaging service “with a focus on speed and security”. Telegram Bots (chatbots) are applications that run inside Telegram to provide simple and factual information, such as weather forecast for the coming weekend, current traffic conditions, definition for a new word etc. on-demand. The purpose of a chatbot is to emulate a human while serving human informational needs. iFoodyBot was built with Node.js and MongoDB. It can count calories and provide recommendations according to user’s weight control goals. A user sends messages to the iFoodyBot with the information about what he/she was eating during the day, the chatbot counts those calories and informs how much calories one needs to consume in order to lose, maintain or gain weight. For example, there are about 46 calories for 100g of unsweetened apple juice (data of the United States Department of Agriculture), and user plans a 2,000-calorie diet (the U.S. Food and Drug Administration recommendations). iFoodyBot understands the message in Telegram “I drink a cup of apple juice” as if a user has already consumed 128.8 calories from 2,000 (1 cup is 248g). iFoodyBot is able not just to memorize all of the eaten food or determine how much calories does each of them contain but also reminds the user to keep daily track of everything eaten and provides statistical data per week/month. Before any further communication with iFoodyBot, the Telegram users should add it to their contact list as usual. Vocabulary MVP is a minimal version of the product with a minimum set of features that is enough to deploy and test the key hypothesis to solve problems of this product potential customers. A hackathon is a short time, for example, two days event where software programmers and other specialists come together to create value for business and society by building a new software product. BizSpark is a Microsoft three-year program that supports IT projects by providing necessary resources such as free access to cloud services, software, and support to design, develop, test products and distribute them on the Internet. 

Use cases of AI chatbots for Learning and Development in corporates 1. Employee coach Corporate learning is not something people love. But it doesn’t have to be this way. And when the companies compete for better employees, good learning opportunities can be an edge. The learning process can be performed through a Facebook messenger bot which trains and quizzes employees. It is designed with microlearning approach in mind – small chunks of information for brief attention spans. The bot can adapt messages to individual employees and boasts a 98% engagement rate. The developers of such chatbots claim that corporate learning bots can save employees about 2-5 days per year which would be spent on actual work, rather than study. 2. Curriculum Customizer Personalized learning is one of the top trends right now. Just as chatbots are. No wonder people look for ways to combine them. Released a month after Facebook messenger, MOOCBuddy was a bot for finding the right Massive Open Online Course (MOOC). Services like Coursera or edX made online learning widely available but choosing the right class was still a problem. MOOCBuddy talked to people and suggested courses based on the topic, language, duration, accreditation and several other factors. It also sent reminders and updates, unless the users opted out. MOOCBuddy was likely the first chatbot of its kind, but at the moment it is no longer available. The concept is still alive, however. Magpie continues the idea. Besides suggesting optimal courses based on user’s profile, it can also recommend educational information in public domain: TED, HBR, BBC and more. The bot begins by asking user several questions to determine their job, position, and industry. That is enough to get a quick recommendation. But if the user provides details like workday structure or skills self-assessment, Magpie can create a detailed list. The bot doesn’t eliminate human involvement. The content that it suggests is taken from a database approved by living, breathing editors. Use cases of AI chatbots for improving student’s learning experience Across the world, classes have migrated online, and often educators cannot personally reach students for teaching, giving feedback, or encouraging them to enroll. It is elevating the use of chatbots in the education sector that serve now as a medium of student-teacher communication. The AI chatbot comes especially handy as: Virtual tutoring tool to personalize every lesson and engage students. Tool for students’ support 24/7 to get instant answers to common questions and to manage students’ life effectively. 1. Virtual tutoring with AI chatbots The most useful application of AI in education is automated, intelligent tutoring. The AI chatbots can help teach students using a series of messages, just like a common chat conversation, but made out of a lecture. A chatbot can test students, give questions, and assess them. Students do not need to contact their teachers and wait a few hours for the information. They can send a message directly to an educational AI chatbot and get real-time scaffolded support with instruction and continuous assessment.  Such on-demand support helps students become independent learners by reducing student frustration and by providing appropriate guidance at the moment of struggle. Also, such a tutor chatbot opens up the teacher’s time to engage with students one-on-one. The chatbot assesses every student’s level of understanding and then provides them with the following parts of a lecture according to their progress. And because data is constantly collected along the way, the chatbot can identify the skills students need to work on to increase their score and will suggest practicing the skill again. Knowre Another popular AI chatbot application is language learning. A good example is Duolingo that has been investing in AI and machine learning to make language learning more engaging by automatically tailoring lessons to each individual — kind of the way a human tutor might. The great thing about using an AI bot is that it will get smarter the more it is used. The purpose of an AI-powered chatbot is to simulate a human for practicing scenarios that users are likely to encounter. They focus principally on functional skills and prepare students to use their language skills in the real world. The language learning chatbots use AI algorithms to understand the user context and be able to answer contextually and uniquely. It means that every user gets a different response for a similar inquiry. Duolingo 2. Virtual students’ support 24/7 with AI chatbots 64 percent of internet users consider 24-hour availability to be the best feature of chatbots. For schools, colleges, and universities, which don’t operate 24/7, chatbots are a way for students to get answers instantly whatever the time. When a teacher has a bunch of students to teach, answering repetitive questions about lesson plans, classes, and schedules is tiring and time-consuming. That’s when AI chatbots and virtual assistants come especially handy. Artificial Intelligence chatbots and virtual assistants don’t just answer simple questions or tell students what the temperature will be tomorrow, but they can organize student’s life on a personal level by proactively taking actions and managing tasks on their behalf. The most famous AI-powered virtual assistant chatbot is Genie, developed and implemented at Deakin University, Australia. Presented through a mobile application, it leverages chatbots, artificial intelligence, voice recognition, and a predictive analytics engine to deliver personalized advice and services, guided assistance, and curated content. It gives students easy access to their unit information, results, timetable, or answers to common student questions. Genie Genie is a proactive agent. So if you have an exam in two days and you haven’t been reading the material, Genie is going to remind you that the exam is coming up and you haven’t touched your material,” Deakin's chief digital officer William Confalonieri said. “To know that, we need to know that you haven’t been reading material (because the learning management system hasn’t been accessed) - we collect all that information in a predictive analytics engine that gathers data and allows Genie to react.” However, software developers realize the limits of AI and use AI chatbots to facilitate conversations with the right support staff when needed. Need your own chatbot? Contact us for a free quote! Use cases of AI chatbots for improving educators’ productivity To educational leaders who struggle to reach a generation that shuns official websites and mass emails, the use of a chatbot in education solves the issue. The reason is students feel communicating in chats more personal. Besides, chatbots are available 24/7 and respond instantly. The response time for 99 percent of queries ranges from 6 to 10 seconds. The increasing number of administrations and teachers recognize this cost-effective and valuable way to keep their students hooked and streamline educational and administrative processes more efficiently. For education stakeholders, AI-powered chatbots come especially handy as: Tool for automation of administrative tasks to save educators’ time and switch their focus on more critical tasks. Tool for gathering feedback about learning material to understand the efficiency of teaching methods and improve the curriculum. 1. Automation of administrative tasks with AI chatbots Admission & Enrollment Forward-thinking educational leaders use AI-powered chatbots both to relieve admissions staff work by answering repetitive questions and to reach students for matters like encouraging them to enroll.  Using a chatbot reduces the summer melt, the phenomenon when students who apply and are accepted to a college fail to enroll. Summer melt affects 22,8% of college-intending high school graduates each year.  By using the AI chatbot to send personalized reminders and walk students through admission processes, Georgia State University reduced summer melt by 19 percent in the first year of implementation and increased the percentage of students completing pre-enrollment processes. An AI virtual chat assistant can answer questions about documents or deadlines and give instructions. Answer common inquiries about types of financial aid (e.g. grants, scholarships, loans) and provide standard fees info.  The chatbot isn’t just the recipient of inquiries and questions – schools, colleges, and universities can use it to proactively send reminders, messages, or news. AdmitHub Retention Poor support is one of the reasons students drop out of college. This means it is necessary for every institution to always guide their students by giving them timely and accurate information. But with no optimization, it is almost impossible to ensure each student is getting proper support. That’s when AI-chatbots come to help. They are programmed to answer common questions instantly and help students with administrative topics 24/7. An AI chatbot has a knowledge database based on real students’ conversations. Once it gets a question, a bot responds in seconds. However, when a bot doesn’t know an answer, the question is sent to a human team. As a human answers new questions, the AI learns by adding new data to its database. It leads to the chatbot’s capability of handling an increasing array of circumstances and questions without human input. 2. Gathering feedback about learning materials with AI chatbot Seeing students’ performance is easy for a teacher. Understanding which of your methods contributed to achieving such performance is another thing entirely. AI chatbots are ideal for teachers and institutes to collect students’ feedbacks. Its usage upgrades the learning processes thanks to increasing the participation of students. Replacing the traditional surveys, a chatbot talks to students via a special messenger and processes their feedbacks, letting the teacher know what works well, what is ineffective, and what else they can implement. HelloTars As the answers are coming in, the AI software analyzes the semantics of what the students have said and prepares a report that a teacher or administrator can review.  NLP and ML are those technologies that can analyze the feedback and understand the sentiment, looking for specific nouns or verbs as well as positive or negative words, the frequency of certain words to derive the overall tone. Then feedbacks are divided into positive (green), neutral (grey), and negative (red) based on the words and associated emotions. As a result, educators can understand the pain points faced by dissatisfied students and find out effective ways to identify and remove those bottlenecks. Belitsoft specializes in both chatbots and e-learning. If you have a project in mind, contact us for a free quote. No strings attached. How to implement AI chatbot in education Building AI chatbots in eLearning differs a lot from basic Q&A bots and needs a thorough analysis.  Implementing an AI chatbot for educational institutions may include the following stages:  Start with the analysis of your objectives. Based on the primary needs of your administration, teachers, and students, it’s necessary to decide what features your chatbot must have and what tasks it must solve. The use cases described in this article can help you analyze. Find an expert development and consulting team. Building an AI bot capable of a human-like conversation requires highly professional programming skills, thorough analysis, and strategy. That's why many educational stakeholders decide to hire outsourcing companies to implement their ideas professionally, cost-effectively, and fast. Such services usually cover all the stages of the bot implementation and include consulting, development, and post-launch support, saving educators’ time and headache. Test your chatbot. At this stage, an AI-powered chatbot is tested to communicate with a restricted group of real students to see if it can be helpful and resolve the assigned task. Deploy and assess. Deploying a chatbot is not time-consuming. Your development team will just need to ensure that all endpoints are connected, and the bot is integrated with your entire infrastructure.  AI chatbots in the education industry can be used both to optimize the teaching process and to make the learning process more engaging and personalized for students. They can also significantly reduce the workload of the administrative staff of the educational institutions. As a result, we can expect an immense growth of the education sector, beneficiary interactions between students and educators, and a superior classroom environment. Feel like starting your own eLearning project yet? Hire a dedicated team for it!