INTRO

Virtual Electronics leverages AI to implement chatbots for a corporate software supplier with its headquarters in London and Singapore.

The client concluded that they need to find a way to save time for their existing sales and marketing teams instead of hiring new employees. She also assumed that they might be missing out on leads while using the traditional approach:

Virtual Electronics offered an intelligent chatbot enabling the customer to collect more leads for social networks and other messaging systems. As a result, their conversion rate increased over 400% and the closing ratio increased by 25%. Moreover, we have even managed to optimize the client’s marketing campaign bringing a 68% CPA decrease!

A chatbot is a server-side software application interacting with network users based on specific rules and patterns used to conduct live chat conversations in lieu of providing direct contact with a human agent.

“People come to our pages having a specific issue in mind, be it a sales inquiry or a question about what we do, or some technical assistance they need. Our visitors never drop by without a reason, they always want to talk to someone on our team.”

CHALLENGE

The client had to deal with countless challenges, such as difficulties in getting information about subscribers' actions, increasing their closing ratio and their social media conversion rate. Our client also noticed that their marketing and sales departments were both working at their full capacities.

To help the customer overcome their challenges, we decided to develop a platform that will connect to social networks and other message exchange systems and imbed chatbots. Our idea was that this platform will then manage the whole interaction process between the system user, the contractor (bot manager) and subscribers. The main goal was to develop a platform with simple social network integration as well as sufficient functionality to create and manage chatbots, interact with users and collect statistical data on subscribers’ actions.

The system was meant to generate and save scenarios specified by the contractor based on the input data. The system will also store statistical data to report on actions of subscribers’ that use scenarios.

Another requirement of the customer was Instagram integration that most of Virtual Electronics' competitors cannot implement.

SOLUTION

We developed the Chatbot project all-in-one final to help the customer deal with their business challenges.

Target process description


When the contract between the System User and Contractor (Bot Manager) is concluded, the Contractor receives the access to their personal account (PA), where they can create and manage chatbot Scenarios, adjust the settings of specific Scenario nodes, set up tracking parameters for particular Subscribers action types and replenish the PA balance.

Full-featured version

The full version of the app is a combination of the following characteristics:

Access control subsystem (testing) that includes:

• Development of a general test plan;

• Test cases with different versions of the test data set for each test scenario;

• Creating and completing tasks for testing;

• Correction of errors discovered during the execution of the test plan;

• Development of additional microservice modules for platform administration (conclusion of contracts with users, mutual settlements, monitoring of platform cloud resources, mutual settlements with cloud resource providers);

• Functional acceptance testing (planning), including the development of:
   - General test plan, a complete set of basic test cases, and a set of in-depth test cases that cover only key areas for all business processes;
   - Variations of test data sets for all test cases of the first and second sets;

• Functional acceptance testing (implementation) involving:
   - Tasks formation for testing and a general plan-schedule for their implementation;
   - Tasks fulfillment for passing a complete set of basic test cases and a set of in-depth test cases covering only key areas for all business processes;
   - Filling task cards, forming a list of detected errors and scenarios of their repetition;
   - Bug fixing and repeated testing cycle (total – 4 iterations).

Facebook users profile data collection

The data collection process includes:

• Planning and preparing load testing through development of:

   - General plan for load testing;
   - Algorithms for generating large amounts of test data automatically;
   - Cloud architecture for testing the system;
   - Scripts for automated data generation and emulation of user activity and launching the bots in the mode of stress testing;

• Load testing:

   - Performing 4 iterations on launching parameterized test scripts and monitoring performance indicators depending on indicators of system load followed by an intermediate analysis of the results;
   - Summing up and generating a report on the testing results;

• Development of a business model for data collection through:

   - Creating a list of profile data for collection and storage (the list may include photos and other data to determine users' color preferences;
   - Developing a business process for importing data subject to legal and technical restrictions;
   - Writing instructions for manual data collection;

• Automation of data collection through developing bot scripts and settings for implementing automatic execution of instructions to users-data collectors, as well as testing and debugging an automatic data collection system and writing instructions for the operator;

• Data collection planning that involves:

   - Creating a set of communities;
   - Selecting scenarios, defining parameters for launching scenarios (sample sizes, keyword sets, hashtags);
   - Developing a cloud platform architecture for working with data collection tools;
   - Calculating tasks deadlines.

• Automatic data collection process that consists of the deployment of the platform, launching processes for automatic collection of users profile data, monitoring the status of processes during their execution, initial checks and results analysis.

“Our recent audit report showed that our marketing and sales teams are struggling to keep up with the workload which leads to a drop in customer satisfaction rate among other issues. Being in the middle of cost-cutting due to the Covid 19 situation, we could not afford to hire more staff. But we were lucky to get linked up with Virtual Electronics — they convinced us to try to implement chatbots into our marketing funnel and it worked!”

DEVELOPMENT

Possible steps for further project development include:

• Development of a color module for extracting primary data from image files for color analysis along with comprehensive testing of color modules:

    - Functional testing and load testing;
   - Performance measurement;
   - Collection of recommendations for required resources;
   - Extrapolar estimates of data processing speed while increasing computing resources;

• Preliminary analysis of the relevance of the profile dataset with the construction of a multidimensional OLAP pilot cube, primary analysis of data (including graphical indicators) for their information content to divide the target audience into categories;

• Segmentation of the target audience using ML methods by developing a microservice for dividing the target audience into segments with similar indicators, identifying hidden relationships between consumer interests and color preferences in user profiles;

• Verification of ML categories of the target audience by:
   - Generating samples of network users for each category;
   - Developing questionnaires and conducting user surveys using bot tools;
   - Analyzing the relevance of using color preferences of network users to categorize the target audience.

RESULTS

Here’s a quick recap of the results the client has been able to achieve since going live with intelligent social networks bots developed by Virtual Electronics:

• Over 400% conversion rate increase
• 25% closing ratio increase
• The unexpected 68% CPA decrease

But don’t take our word for it! Here’s what our client has to say:

“We are grateful to Virtual Electronics for coming up with the solution that alleviated the enormous workload and in fact helped us to make more deals without increasing our staff. The bots are intelligent enough to answer most questions for our customers in real-time keeping them happy and letting our sales team step in complex situations. Thanks to Virtual Electronics, we can now focus on what matters the most and adapt to today’s changing times while providing better service and customer experience to our clients.”