Umni Webinar: chatbots and MyBot in action
Umni organizes an online presentation and a demo of a chatbot for a hotel and a travel agency, the chatbot management platform MyBot and ideas for applying the chatbot.
In 40 minutes, Umni CEO Elitza Stoilova will tell what chatbots do, how they help, how they can be used, how much they cost, and answer questions.
As a reminder, Umni was one of the first companies to reach out to help the local tourism industry and offer its services for free.
- For the hotels: free implementation and free support until September 1 of a basic hotel chatbot with conversational AI
- For travel agencies: free implementation and free maintenance until September 1 of a basic chatbot.
Participation in the webinar is free, but with a limited number of participants. Registration: https://m.me/umnipromo (in Bulgarian only). As an alternative, you can register by sending us an email at sales@umni.bg
Umni with a webinar on automation as a crisis solution
On May 12, together with our partners Travel Academy, Umni had a webinar on how technology helps and will help businesses get out of the crisis (emphasis on tourism, but the trend is valid for all industries).
During the webinar, questions were discussed as to what technologies already exist and help the tourism business and what technologies are emerging/enhancing at the moment and should be considered in the planning of the next 5 years, for self-service as the main form of service in the post-crisis period and what are 10 Gartner recommendations for business adaptation right now.
Of course, we also mentioned AI chatbots as an affordable and fast deployment solution. Elitza Stoilova, CEO of Umni, was the panelist on the topic of automation as a crisis solution in this webinar.
Umni participated with AI chatbot in #EUvcVirus
#EUvcVirus! Our first hackathon was probably the biggest one organized so far. For #Umni was an honor to participate in it and to communicate with innovators, with bright minds in Europe, gathered in one place virtually. Umni participated in the hackathon with the chatbot management platform that allows hotels to activate an AI chatbot fast and easy.
This weekend’s incredible energy will push Europe towards more innovation and technology for the benefit of our lives as people, as business and as a society. This hackathon showed that there are no small ideas and projects, and every A-ha moment deserves attention and support.
Chatbots will help Hotels recover from the COVID-19 crisis
The chatbot agency Umni’ team is also involved in the fight against the virus. The startup announced that it will provide free of charge production, implementation and months of support until September 01’20 on a basic hotel chat, in Bulgarian or English, to all new customers within the company’s potential capacity.
Umni is focused on creating, maintaining and training AI virtual assistants for hotels and other businesses. Last year, the company received the Best Hotel and Restaurant Software 2019 award from Smartourism.bg and became known for making the first city tourist chat in Bulgaria, Plovdiv City Concierge. Umni’s CEO, Elitza Stoilova, entered the technology world after 22 years in the tourism industry, holding positions as General Manager and Director of Sales and Marketing at hotels and a tour operator, and have the unique view on both the tourism industry and the need for technology in the industry.
Question: According to World Travel and Tourism Council, 1 million people worldwide are losing their jobs in the tourism industry daily because of the Covid-19. What will happen as a result of it? Process optimization, cost cutting, including downsizing, closing businesses?
Answer: Each of these options would happen in stages in the businesses as a measure of survival, depending on how long the crisis will last. In all cases, however, we need to think about our life, work and business after the crisis, after 3, 4, 6 … 12 months, 2 years. Five years. Where do we want to be? As bad as this virus is and the economic crisis it causes, history has shown it many times: they will pass, we will survive it.
If it is for each of us, we need to invest in education, training, learning new things – we will need this knowledge to be in a better place tomorrow, to be more competitive and to live better in the post-crisis world.
If it is for a business, now is the time to analyze all operations, products and services, find everything that is subject to optimization, digitalization and automation, and implement the necessary technologies. Competition after the crisis will be aggressive – for customers, for maintaining the business place in the market and for new markets, for experienced staff, and those who are mobile, online, flexible and fast, and there whenever customers need them – in just a second – will be successful businesses. This cannot happen the old way of doing business – “because that’s how we are used to do it.” Maximum use of technology and investment in innovation and in educated people will be needed.
Question: Why you think the chatbot would be helpful to the hotels?
Answer: Someone has to work, accept requests and respond to customers 24/7 even when no one is in the office, when the business is temporarily closed. This can be done by chatbot. The crisis will pass, and customers will return. First, domestic tourism will begin to recover – we see it now in China, and historically it has been like that after other crises, but not at such a speed that businesses can quickly return to their normal levels of work and business models. Businesses will have to rely for months on a very small team to provide customer service for the customers, which will be not enough for picking up. Chatbot can fill in the gaps, take on tasks and communication, and help the hotel optimize the work of available staff for greater business and customer benefits, with less cost.
Also, customers after COVID-19 will be much more comfortable with technologies and would look for self-service solutions when face-to-face communication is not necessarily due to social distancing and safety awareness.
Question: What the hotel chatbot does and why you choose to help hotels?
Answer: We have clients from different industries, but the hotels are predominant, and with them our team has the richest experience. We can’t help everyone, but we can help the hotels!
We will invest our time and work in as many hotels as we can in the coming months. What we offer are free configuration, implementation and months of support until September 01’20 of a basic hotel chatbot, in Bulgarian or English. Configuration time will depend on the number of requests.
Hotel Chatbot operates 24/7 on Facebook Messenger and the hotel site in 1 or more languages and can assist multiple clients at the same time. It helps with, directs and automates requests for hotel services, such as accommodation, massage, restaurant table, room service, transfer or other service. In addition, the chatbot automates frequently asked questions through a ‘conversational AI module’, saving staff’ and customers time and saving hotel resources.
Question: When is a good time for a hotel to implement a chatbot and how long it takes?
Answer: Creating a hotel chatbot depends on how quickly the hotel can provide the necessary information. With the fast response from the business, the implementation of a basic chatbot can occur within one month. We think now is a very good time for this activity because most or all of the hotel’s activities are paused and this situation will continue for at least 1-1.5 months, if there will be some season. It’s a good idea to have a chatbot already deployed and operational when the first customers start writing questions to the business and submitting their requests.
Question: Is there anything special about your hotel chatbots?
Answer: Umni’s Hotel Chatbot Management platform, MyBot allows the hotel to confirm or deny requests received through Messenger and processed by the chatbot, with 2-3 clicks, to create and offer promotions and service rates directly in the bot, to keep up-to-date chatbot replies about hotel services and territory, and receive up-to-date statistics about the consumer behavior for marketing and planning – all from one place. By the way the chatbot become also an assistant to new employees and help in their training by providing them with an answer on questions that are new to them.
The very special feature is the centralized database of frequently asked questions behind the conversational AI module. Our hotel chatbot’ database currently contains over 350 hotel topics with over 3,000 customer questions. By the end of 2020, we plan to exceed 1,000 recognizable hotel topics!
Question: How the hotel customers will find out about the hotel chatbot?
Answer: This is one of the good sides of this technology. The hotel chatbot and the individual request forms have their own URL link and QR code. This allows the hotel to direct customers to the chatbot or a request form from anywhere online and offline: email, social media post, SMS, brochure, menu, flyer and other collaterals – with 1 click for the client. Leave a QR code in a visible place in the room or elsewhere where the customers traffic is high, and customers can self-service themselves in booking a service with minimal intervention by the hotel staff.
- For more information send us a message or call us.
The newest version of a basic hotel chatbot you can see below:
Umni participate in scientific paper about COVID-19
An article in the field of COVID-19 and the digitalization in tourism with Umni participation was published at arXiv at Cornell University!
Thanks to Prof. Stanislav Ivanov for inviting Umni to participate in this exciting international project: how COVID-19 would impact long-term travel and tourism, the threat of biosecurity to the businesses, and the increased automation and digitalization in the industry as a result of it. We hope the article will be useful and will be a good food for thoughts not only for tourism professionals but also for businesses in other industries.
The article was prepared by the joint efforts of the academia – Prof. Stanislav Ivanov from Varna University of Management (Varna, BG) and Ass. prof. Craig Webster from Ball State University (Indiana, USA), and the business – Elitza Stoilova, CEO of Umni (Sofia, BG) and Daniel Slobodskoy, CEO of Sezam24 – Booking Analytics (Prague, Czechia).
Chatbot Agency or Freelancer?
Increasingly, chatbots of businesses and organizations across the world and in our country pop up on our screens. You hear that they save staff time, business resources, improve customer service, and sales go up. You are told that customers expect your business to be online 24/7 and to provide them with a self-service solution. Maybe this is the time for a chatbot in your business.
Creating a chatbot on your own sounds like a great idea. You register on one of the many do-it-yourself platforms, you start clicking, adding pictures, links, and files. There are enough guides and tutorials on Youtube and the internet and there are at least a dozen or so good chatbot platforms on the market right now.
We assume that you have previously determined what the chatbot will do. You have read all about chatbots and know about all the possible functionalities in a chatbot, and you have already selected the best one for your business.
We also assume that you know how to describe the processes in a chatbot and to visualize all the connections in it, how to structure the information – and have written it black on white before you enter the platform and start clicking.
So, your Chatbot is live. However, this is only the beginning – every month from now on you must maintain, develop and adapt it, train it and promote it…
Wasn’t it easier for someone else to do it and maintain it?
Here are some questions to answer before deciding which way to go – to create and maintain the chatbot yourself, assign this job to a “freelancer a friend of mine know”, or trust a chatbot agency.
1. Do you have any programming skills?
Most platforms claim that you can create a chatbot without a drop in programming skills. They offer one way or another a visual assistant for creating a chatbot. Combine different boxes, links, pictures, and other elements – it looks easy. This way however you can make an extremely basic chatbot, nothing more.
For a chatbot to be good in terms of functionality, truly beneficial to the business, staff and the customers – with integrations to external platforms or email, built-in request forms, and other automated through the chatbot tasks, you will need to know to program.
2. Do You want to know what’s really going on in your chatbot?
Most platforms offer some type of statistics. Usually, it comes down to how many times a link has been clicked, possibly how many men and how many women have visited the bot, how many visitors, in general, there are, maybe also from which country they are.
But the number of people who visited the chatbot does not really answer whether they just entered the bot without writing a single message in it.
It is much more important to know how many people returned to your bot this month, how much time they spent in it, how many messages they exchanged, what they searched for and at what time of day… If you really want to know what happens in your chatbot, then you need access to a specialized platform that a chatbot agency would have. In Bulgaria, such a platform with detailed statistics is provided by Chatbot Agency Umni. All Umni customers have access to it and it is called Umni Insight. More about Umni Insight you can find on the link below: Umni Insights – Chatbot Stats
3. Do you know how to train your chatbot to understand and respond meaningfully?
The chatbot is not a list of answered questions in an instant message and is not a repetition of the website.
The essence of a chatbot is to chat – when people ask questions, to understand them and to answer them with the right information. Many chatbot platforms offer the addition of a basic keyword recognition. However, the chatbot only catches one keyword in the sentence. Working with keywords in this way often causes the chatbot to respond incorrectly and appear „dull“.
Let’s take this example.
Let’s say the keyword is park (like a park, for walks).
In this example, if a person writes Where is the nearest park?, the chatbot will respond correctly and provide information about the park.However, what if the user wrote Where can I park my car?, or Where to park in the city? The chatbot will again tell him where the park is, which will be wrong and in other cases could lead to problems.
Of course, you can write word combinations or entire sentences instead of keywords. However, the chatbot will only understand them if there is a 100% match. This will not work because you do not know exactly how the user would structure the sentence and what mistakes he would make.
What you can do to solve the above issue is to integrate into the bot an external tool (from Google or another NLU – conversational AI provider) to help understand what the user is writing and to give the right answer. Here you are facing again plenty of reading, learning, programming and a lot of testing (if you use an external connector such as Janice then knowing how to do the settings) to get the chatbot to talk to its external “brain”.
The easiest way to train a chatbot is to give it to someone to train it for you, and you just must provide the information needed. This shall be someone for whom this is a daily routine and knows how to do it properly, which is what a chatbot agency does.
4. Do you know how to comply with GDPR?
This is a serious topic. With a little more work, the chatbot can be made GDPR compliant, but do you know if you are GDPR compatible? Is this freelancer you hired GDPR compliant? Are the tools used by this freelancer and the location where the information is stored GDPR compliant? Does he himself have GDPR relations with you?
At chatbot agency Umni, we take this matter seriously because it is extremely important from a legal point of view!
IMPORTANT !!! Before you start working on your chatbot, make sure you can create it and maintain it from a GDPR perspective. If you choose to trust someone else for your chatbot, then ask for a Personal Data Processing Agreement between your company and him / her / them.
5. Chatbot development and dynamics
If you have decided to have a basic chatbot with several buttons and links, nothing new happens in it, or to update something from time to time, no special functionalities int it, skip this point.
The life and the development of a good chatbot begin at the time of its “birth” – its activation in Messenger. From now on, the chatbot requires monthly technical and information care – to add dynamic information (for marketing and sales purposes), to maintain and further develop, and to train it:
- Update answers, pricing and other information
- Adding new topics to the smart module based on conversation history with customers. The more topics you have, the “smarter” your chatbot becomes.
- Bot re-training – fixing misunderstood issues
- Creating and deploying bot-specific promotions valid for the chatbot users
- Monitor and support request forms and other functionalities, integrations with email, SMS or other platforms and any other chatbot integrations and connections
- Technical adaptation of the chatbot to the changes in its ecosystem.
Modern technologies are evolving very dynamically, and any change in the chatbot platform where the bot is made, on Facebook, in messenger, in external applications with which your chatbot is integrated, may require to adapt or reconfigure the chatbot to continue to function.
Remember, the chatbot is a dynamic software solution which is a combination of technologies that come together to accomplish tasks, not a complete standalone software installed on someone’s computer.
If you want someone to successfully deal with all these dynamics on behalf of you, this is for sure a job for a chatbot agency. In Bulgaria, many IT companies add a chatbot to their service list, but chatbots are not the focus of their business. Digital marketing agencies that offer a chatbot service limit the use of it to its most basic functionalities, mainly for short-term marketing purposes. Freelancers work on a piece-by-piece basis and only undertake the configuration of a chatbot, rarely engaging in the maintenance and further development of the chatbot.
For its part, the chatbot agency Umni Chat provides a complete cycle of chatbot services – from planning to configuration, maintenance and training, providing its clients with access to the Umni’s MyBot chat management platform, where without any technical knowledge:
- Easily add or change business information in the “smart module”;
- With one click, the staff can connect the chatbot answer to another chatbot section such as to request forms, pricing, etc. to direct users to action
- With a few clicks, the staff can create and manage modules for promotion, pricing of services and more that appear straight into the chatbot.
- With one click staff can confirm or deny requests received through the chatbot
- Access live chat statistics about the user behavior on the chatbot
** If the specifics of your chatbot require a different approach, Umni experts will do their best to provide a personalized solution…
6. We have a chatbot, now what? Promoting the chatbot
Wonderful! You have a chatbot or have been given access to the platform where it was built on, to manage and develop it yourself. And now what?
The chatbot does not search for users on its own. You must direct them to it so that it may do the work for which it was created. Do you know any good practices and interesting ideas on how to position a chatbot online and offline to attract users to it?
Do you follow the changes on Facebook (or other messenger platforms) from a chatbot marketing point of view – what and when can be done in a chatbot and what are the restrictions, so as not to break any rules of the platform and to get your chatbot or account in trouble? What will be the effect of any feature changes on the functionality of your chatbot?
Do you know what the 24 hours rule means for Facebook chatbots and what messages you can send via bot to your customers? Are there technical or other loopholes in the rules and what are they?
If you do not know the answers to these questions and do not have the time to read daily various platform documentation, chatbot blogs, forums, and case studies to gain interesting, useful and up-to-date information from them, you better work with those who can help you and provide you with such information, process and collect it for you.
For example, chatbot agency Umni provides its clients with a guidebook with helpful ideas and tips for promoting a chatbot, “I have a chatbot, now what?”. Customers receive current news and updates by email.
Here’s a tip from the guidebook you probably didn’t think about:
Set the website to show a pop-up with attractive text and image, and a link to the chatbot when the user tries to close the page.
We hope this article has been useful for you to navigate and avoid the many common mistakes associated with creating and using a chatbot.