Talk-A-Bot

We’re happy to announce that Talk-A-Bot Poland became reality. We has just established a polish company, Talk-a-bot Polska and we are ready to conquer the Polish market.

We asked Peter Illésy, our Business Development Manager on-site to fill us in on the details, pitfalls and challenges he had to overcome during the process.

1. How long have you been working at Talk-A-Bot?

I had my first interview in December 2018 and started working sometime in January 2019.

2. What is the attitude towards chatbots in Poland?

When talking with innovators, the attitude towards digital modernization is great. People are excited and keen on implementing new, cutting edge ideas for their businesses. When it comes to bigger entities, the process of entering and sealing a deal becomes slow.  Sometimes, especially in less developed areas, we still have to explain what a chatbot is and what benefits it can bring to the companies.

3. Do you think creating a Polish entity will help with your efforts?

Surely! Numerous times we got great feedback about our services and references, but the Polish chatbot market is already quite saturated. The idea behind Talk-A-Bot Polska (Talk-A-Bot Poland) was, that with a Polish company we can answer all questions. Hence creating deals will be easier.

4. What were the difficulties you had to overcome while creating a Polish company compared to Hungary? Do you have any fun facts for us?

To be honest, the process is quite hard. It requires multiple steps to develope the proper legal background and even opening a bank account takes several weeks. We had the advantage of being accepted into an accelerator program, which helped us in the “soft landing” giving us a competitive advantage. Featuring the difficulty of establishing an entity, there’s a program called PARP, in which the Polish government helps foreign companies to enter Poland. However all documentation and communication are conducted in Polish… which makes things quite difficult for non-native businesses.

I can recall one funny story during the process. When our bank accountant told us the story of his recent training. The tax consultants referred to Poland as the second most difficult tax scene in Europe… Can you guess which country landed first place? Hungary.

The Polish market is 4 times bigger than the Hungarian, therefore, we expect substantial growth here compared to the Hungarian market. We’re excited about the future and we’re already in the process of hiring our first Polish employee, a chatbot trainer.

Are you in Poland and interested in chatbots?

Contact us!

Talk-A-Bot Polska
+36 70 294 0074
kontakt@talkabot.net

CHEQ Microsoft Teams chatbot has arrived! As you may know Microsoft Teams is a chat-based digital workplace and it is also a key product of Office 365. It represents everything that users and managers strive to achieve, even if they do so along different lines: a joint work between individuals and groups. The purpose of Microsoft Teams is to enable the user to handle meetings, workplace documents, private meetings all within the application. In light of this, during the development of our CHEQ application, our goal was to be a part of this ecosystem.

We live in a digital world. Despite this, the manual workers and non-office employees do not officially have a business communication tool. At the same time, they use smartphones in their everyday lives, so they ought to be easily available. They use free messaging platforms, moreover, they have their own inner workgroups on WhatsApp and Messenger

CHEQ Microsoft Teams chatbot was mainly made for production companies where manual workers are not part of any digital ecosystems yet. Just imagine colleagues trying to contact you through a private channel because they can’t find you in the office. Not to mention occasions like urgent announcements when you have to reach everybody quickly. There are many situations like this, countless small questions and one may feel like they have answered them a thousand times, on a thousand plus one channels.

Why CHEQ?

The purpose of chatbots is to automate communication, and the purpose of CHEQ is to automate the company’s internal communication. However, we would not want to provide an application to people, with which there is only more work rather than less. Because of this CHEQ’s first goal is to take a back seat. Manual workers use their own, already installed chat apps (Messenger, Viber, company application), but at the same time, the office employees, who get questions through the chatbot, or who simply want to communicate with the workers, can do so in Microsoft Teams.

Yes, CHEQ will be another application within Microsoft Teams besides the meeting planner, private chats and the document editor. We take great pride in the fact we managed to develop an integration that only few IT companies were able to do, and thus we can provide the best experience for the employees of production companies. Furthermore, their colleagues will message them less on Facebook and Viber, therefore their private lives can be protected.

Important

Currently only those users can use the CHEQ application within Microsoft Teams whose company subscribed to the introduction of internal communication chatbot. If you would like to have it, you may read more about it on CHEQbot.com.

In order to use CHEQ inside Microsoft Teams, all you have to do is to install the application for the company. CHEQ is a central distribution point, which authenticate the employees based on their Microsoft username.

CHEQ utilises all the opportunities offered by the Chrome engine powered Microsoft Teams. Menu points are accessible by tabs on the top, and the Conversations tab includes two more features. First and foremost, those who are on the other side of the chatbot, get messages from colleagues through the chatbot – it serves them as a notification centre. Here they can find out what questions were asked, by whom and in what topic. On the other hand, this is also the worker side of the chatbot for them, so they can be notified about the company announcements.

Facebook just announced that after 15th of January, 2020 they’re going to close their 24 hours window policy and chatbots can’t send messages to users… or can they?

Everybody felt after the F8 conference that the number of Messenger chatbots reached a critial mass. It’s clear for everybody that they don’t want this platform to become a Facebook chatbot spam field – and of course they still wish to monetise them. The solution: sponsored messages, but let us tell more about this.

As they’ve said several times:

„Messenger Platform’s policies are designed to help people and businesses connect in ways that drive meaningful outcomes. At the heart of this is the understanding that people and businesses need a seamless, reliable way to get something done – whether it is getting a question answered, making a purchase, or communicating important and relevant updates.”

We can sum it up easily:

From January if a customer wants to contact the business: no change. Chatbots are still free. It’ll be just like as it’s now.

However, it will be different if the business wants to contact customers. First those companies, that have money for sponsored messages, can spam Messenger inboxes. We’re unsatisfied with this, because in our opinion these changes won’t bring the expected result: user protection from unwanted spams and sponsored messages.

On the other hand, we welcome these changes because Facebook now forces chatbot providers to create chatbots with real business value. Since 2016 when Talk-A-Bot was founded, we developed around 35 functions for Messenger as well as Viber, Line, Telegram and Microsoft Teams. With these app-like features we are still competitive on the chatbot market.

Sending marketing content to the users via chatbots

Surely it became more difficult and costly, but do not forget what Facebook messaged to businesses:

“We will continue to invest in more and better ways to help businesses connect with their customers wherever they are, including updates to m.me links, various entry points across our family of apps, as well as ad products that lead to Messenger.”

Talk-A-Bot still believes in the power of the Facebook Messenger platform as it’s still one of the best channels for digital business-to-consumer interaction. Talk-A-Bot’s unique, multilingual bots natively support 100+ languages using sophisticated language understanding in a secure way. Our content communication know-how helps our clients to achieve at least 85%-95% response accuracy rate with their chatbots. These capabilities combined with Messenger’s user reach really helps to automate and monetize business to human communication.

For sure, more changes are expected regarding Facebook Messenger. Security and privacy is still a major concern, so we’re looking forward the backend Integration of Messenger, Whatsapp and Instagram Direct that could be the largest global chatbot platform ever.

Client: Viber

Location: Southeast Asia, Great Britain, Wales, Australia

Date of implementation: 2019 June

Platform: Viber

Take a look at the case study

Situation:

 

In May 2019, cricket-loving countries – such as Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal and so on – were eagerly awaiting the start of the June Cricket World Cup held in England & Wales. Accordingly, Viber saw a major spike in user growth during the tournaments with the excitement and fanfare surrounding the game. Indeed, this is where Talk-A-Bot chatbot solutions and Viber’s aim came together and we started to work on the World Cricket Bot.

Solution:

 

In cooperation with Viber, we delivered our sports game bot, within 7 weeks. To put it simply, the World Cricket bot’s main aim is to promote the Viber platform in countries where cricket is a national sport. It does so by offering a cool platform to get information about the game, predict results and win. Not only is it intuitive and entertaining, but it is also easy to use. Incidentally, game or quiz bots have immense potential for promotional campaigns, employee training, lead generation regardless of what industry you are in. Aditionally, they provide an effective marketing tool for event promotion too. Furthermore, the bots mean more engagement. “Engagement” is perhaps the most valuable resource a business can tap into. Also, a new way to increase conversion or re-engage cold leads.

Functions:

1. Send a reminder every morning for the matches of the day to make predictions – users get a daily reminder about the upcoming Cricket matches.
2. Allow users to place bets – users are able to submit the predictions for each match for 3 questions (guessing for both teams)
3. Leaderboard – There are Global and Country Leaderboards, to see the most important thing: Cricket World Cup scores!
4. Invitation system – users can invite friends to play with or challenge them to predict better
5. Share information about the match schedule and the previous results

Results:

• 175400 total users
• 101379 subscribed users
• 46839 total predictions
• 40 000 new users within one day
• 12 000 predictions within one day
• 6021 coupons prize
• 7871 stickers prize
• Top 5 countries: Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Great Britain, Australia

Microsoft Teams is a chat-based digital workplace and it is also a key product of Office 365.

It represents everything that users and managers strive to achieve, even if they do so along different lines: a joint work between individuals and groups. The purpose of Microsoft Teams is to enable the user to handle 

• meetings, 
• workplace documents, 
• and private meetings all within the application. 

In light of this, during the development of our CHEQ application, our goal was to be a part of this ecosystem.

We live in a digital world. Despite this, the manual workers and non-office employees do not officially have a business communication tool. At the same time, they use smartphones in their everyday lives, so they ought to be easily available. They use free messaging platforms, moreover, they have their own inner workgroups on WhatsApp and Messenger

CHEQ was mainly made for production companies where manual workers are not part of any digital ecosystems yet. Just imagine colleagues trying to contact you through a private channel because they can’t find you in the office. Not to mention occasions like urgent announcements when you have to reach everybody quickly. There are many situations like this, countless small questions and one may feel like they have answered them a thousand times, on a thousand plus one channels.

Why CHEQ?

The purpose of chatbots is to automate communication, and the purpose of CHEQ is to automate the company’s internal communication. However, we would not want to provide an application to people, with which there is only more work rather than less. Because of this CHEQ’s first goal is to take a back seat. Manual workers use their own, already installed chat apps (Messenger, Viber, company application), but at the same time, the office employees, who get questions through the chatbot, or who simply want to communicate with the workers, can do so in Microsoft Teams.

Yes, CHEQ will be another application within Microsoft Teams besides the meeting planner, private chats and the document editor. We take great pride in the fact we managed to develop an integration that only few IT companies were able to do, and thus we can provide the best experience for the employees of production companies. Furthermore, their colleagues will message them less on Facebook and Viber, therefore their private lives can be protected.

Important: Currently only those users can use the CHEQ application within Microsoft Teams whose company subscribed to the introduction of internal communication chatbot. If you would like to have it, you may read more about it on CHEQbot.com.

In order to use CHEQ inside Microsoft Teams, all you have to do is to install the application for the company. CHEQ is a central distribution point, which authenticates the employees based on their Microsoft username.

CHEQ utilises all the opportunities offered by the Chrome engine powered Microsoft Teams. Menu points are accessible by tabs on the top, and the Conversations tab includes two more features. First and foremost, those who are on the other side of the chatbot, get messages from colleagues through the chatbot – it serves them as a notification centre. Here they can find out what questions were asked, by whom and in what topic. On the other hand, this is also the worker side of the chatbot for them, so they can be notified about the company announcements.

See the official website: www.cheqbot.com

Or read another blog post about CHEQ!

Even though we are all aware that robots are becoming a part of our everyday lives, it sounds outrageous that the human resource department could be replaced by robots. However, predictions about chatbots are coming true: they are already changing the HR industry.

In this article, we would like to emphasize the most impactful researches about chatbots in order to provide a better insight into them and the chatbot market in general. We can say that chatbots are the present and their future seems to be even brighter. Gartner predicts that by the end of 2020, roughly 80% of customer interaction will be handled by chatbots and without a human agent.

A break-up with mobile apps

Enterprises will start abolishing mobile apps, mostly because of the saturated market. This leads to a prediction that 50% of the companies will be investing way more into the chatbots than mobile apps just 2 years from now (Gartner). Due to increasing trends in the chatbot market and positive perception of their advantages, Juniper predicts that in 2022 the worth of cost savings will be around $8 billion. In addition to that, 2.5 billion hours will be saved combining customers’ and businesses’ savings by 2023 (Juniper). In light of the above, we expect that the overall market value will reach 1.3 billion $ by 2024 (Global Market Insights).

Human-centred industry

It seems reasonable that the chatbot market is evolving in the e-commerce, real estate and travel industries – industries where human contact is less important. Nevertheless, nowadays the potential is prominent also in the HR segment, where chatbots are perceived more positively every day. To put it simply, The HR department is the main department in the company which handles the soft factors and the difficulties of employees. This can make it difficult to understand how can it be “replaced” by robots. Considering this, we divided HR chatbots into three main fields based on the solutions they provide and internal communication.

Recruitment bots

Some companies aim for a total replacement of employees working in the HR department, and we see recruitment bots as perfect assistants. In majority the recruitment bots offer features such as onboarding, scheduling the interviews, screening the candidates and answering queries. They handle the administrative tasks that take a lot of time when done by a person, but a moment, when done by the chatbot. As mentioned above, some recruitment bots have the feature of interviewing and picking the appropriate candidate. Yet, the process can be problematic because of the lack of empathy, language barriers, the sense of security in case of sensitive topics, etc. There is also a threat of knowing the algorithm behind the bot that could make an imperfect candidate a perfect employee in the eyes of the bot. Or vice versa.

Therapist bots – employee support and improvement for the company culture

Therapist bots are mainly used and perceived as bots providing a solution in healthcare. Such a bot, for instance, Woe bot, makes mental health accessible to everyone and breaks down communication barriers. This is a chatbot which is specialized in making human interaction on an emotional level, which could be interesting also in the future for HR chatbots. Regardless, people are the company; their satisfaction is one of the most important factors for their retention or making a decision for leaving the company. Such bots would support employees on an emotional level and keep them happy. It may be a milestone in the HR department as well.

All in one bot – CHEQbot

All in one is a segment that offers solutions from managing administrative tasks to making employees happy and appreciated. The general idea of chatbots is to be accessible to everyone everywhere. The problem remains within the enterprises where the workers are out on the field. However, this is not the case in this segment. All in one solution covers the top-down, bottom-up and two-way communication. CHEQ is an internal communication channel with specific features gathered in one product. These features include:

• lifecycle management
• different roles and personalized approach
• recruitment, onboarding and training
• quizzes, satisfaction surveys, feedbacks
• requesting/approving sick leaves or vacations
• offboarding
• and many more.

It is a great solution for companies searching for support in the HR department. It utilises popular chat applications and has been successfully integrated into Microsoft Teams.

Although we are in a major developing process, the human touch and relations among people in the company are very important. Due to the positive perception among consumers and understanding of usability by enterprises, we expect that the predictions about a better and bigger chatbot market will become true sooner or later.