STC: Tafani, a Verint Community intranet where its people ask, share and put forward ideas
4 Roads built Tafani, STC's intranet on Verint Community: questions and discussions, ideation challenges, surveys and knowledge, on 54 custom widgets.
Microsoft Bot Framework
DS Automobiles: a chatbot for questions and test drive bookings, live in 8 weeks
4 Roads built DS Automobiles a chatbot that answered people's questions and booked test drives with a nearby dealer. It was up and running in 8 weeks.
It was great to have a technical partner who was confident in directing the project forward. It's getting harder to train and retain staff, and to retain high levels of customer service. We now have an innovative customer service solution to represent the brand.
The brief
Questions about electric cars, and answers people had to search for.
DS Automobiles, created in 2014, brings French luxury to the car market: a premium option for drivers looking for something different, with personal, genuine service at every step.
DS had set itself the aim of being 'electrified only' by 2025. Many people were still learning what electric cars offer and how good they are, and as electric cars became more cost-effective, more people wanted to find out.
DS wanted to turn that interest into test drive bookings, but its website could not meet everyone's needs. People had to search through its pages for answers, and a website alone could not answer so wide a range of questions quickly without getting in their way.
"We wanted to offer a higher standard of service and make it easy for people to research us as a brand," says Kris Cholmondeley, DS Automobiles' Head of Communications.
- Client: DS Automobiles
- Technology: A custom chatbot on the Microsoft Bot Framework, in Microsoft Azure
- Timeframe: 8 weeks
The approach
A chatbot that does more than answer the question.
4 Roads saw that a custom chatbot could give DS's customers a quicker, smoother experience, answering questions and handling requests straight away. Automation would take the friction out, but not at the expense of a personal, genuine experience.
Many chatbots only react: they answer the question and stop. DS also wanted to keep prospective customers interested by offering them content about the model they were looking at, and that needed a custom element.
After weighing up the off-the-shelf options, 4 Roads built on the Microsoft Bot Framework. Using the framework in Microsoft Azure meant it could build quickly: the chatbot was up and running within 8 weeks.
Two workflows
Questions and test drives, in two conversations people could switch between.
To keep each one quick, 4 Roads gave the chatbot two separate workflows: one for asking questions, one for booking a test drive. People could switch between them, and pick either up again, at any point.
To book a test drive, a person entered their postcode and the chatbot showed the dealerships near them. When they finished, their details went to the dealer they had chosen.
The answers
Around 50 answers, written from DS's own FAQs.
4 Roads built the chatbot's knowledge base from DS's existing FAQs, which made it quick to do, and rewrote the answers to be easy to take in and conversational. Around 50 responses were written.
4 Roads' own testers then fine-tuned the responses, training the chatbot's machine learning to find the most relevant answer accurately.
Keeping it current
Answers DS's team could change without a developer.
4 Roads trained DS's team to add, update and remove questions themselves, with no need for a developer.
To make reviewing easy, the chatbot kept every question it could not answer, showing DS where answers needed adding or updating.
Results
Enquiries through the chatbot.
DS Automobiles received enquiries through the chatbot. No figures were published.
Up and running within 8 weeks, answering from around 50 responses
The project's timeframe, to the chatbot running, and the number of responses 4 Roads wrote for it from DS's existing FAQs.
Have a project like this in mind?
Tell us what your customers are trying to do, and we will start from there.
Speak to Rob (we can't promise he won't be on his bike)
More project work
Acticare: a B2B ecommerce platform built for smarter care home procurement
4 Roads replaced Acticare's ecommerce platform with a B2B system linked to OGL and MaxOptra: budgets, approvals, preferred products and self-service.