Chatbot for Quoting

“Conversational AI” is a fancy phrase for chatting with a machine similar to like you would with a human. It is less about having a conversation as the intentional outcome. Maybe we should call it intentional chatbot?

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Anyways, a chatbot seems to be highly interesting when it comes to ordering custom made stuff, physical products made to your taste, like a pizza. It’s super straight forward and only limited by bad app and website design.

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Ecommerce websites often are convoluted with information that is pretty much useless when first landing on their homepage. That’s why you can’t have enough landingpages…

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Having someone stand at the door guiding us in the right direction would be super nice: ”Hi I’m John, welcome at Coshape: may I ask what are you looking for today” “Handmade Swiss Cheese” “Great choice, sir! You’ll find that to your right and then at the very end of the cheese station.”

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Supermarkets usually have a similar layout, and we go there often; a hardware store doesn’t and I find myself asking for direction – or rather I find myself looking around for someone I could pose my questions to 😊

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Now, imagine:

Having someone ask the right questions at the right time when it gets down to the nitty gritty.

I imagine it to be a really fun experience because I’d know I can rely on the expert. That they will ask every question that is important to get exactly what I want regardless of the order I ask them.

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- I want hand-made swiss cheese?

- What kind?

- Hmm I don’t know

- …

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or:

- I want a pound of this cheese.

- …

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or:

- I want a pound of this very handmade swiss cheese.

- Great choice! Sliced?

- You tell me, but I’ve heard that pre-slicing affects the taste?

- Ahhh, you’re a gourmet. Correct it dries out the cheese after a while and…

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And if the chatbot does not know of your customers answer?

No problem, at the right time you escalate to a sales engineer:

Do you know how often people are surprised when someone actually picks up the phone or answers their email?

The human touch is priceless! You actually want that human touch somewhere in your customer experience! Especially when you don’t compete against price but when your customers pay you for your service, depth of service like customization, and your expertise!

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A chatbot for ordering (Conversational Salesbot) would be fun for customers who don’t want to read through everything and just rely on an expert to guide them. Basically, someone who waits for you at the hardware store and is by your side while you discuss with them your home improvement project and buy the right stuff (without them being salesy).

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And a request for quotation chatbot (Conversational RFQ) would be fun for your sales engineers because now they get all the information, they need right away without having to re-ask the obvious, that, that could have been avoided.

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It fits into the great future finally feasible and right in front of us: asynchronous work. Powered by what we already do: asynchronous communication, but this time with an conversational AI to scale your skilled workforce.

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