Until a few years ago, the Mobile-First business was a relatively new concept. Now, that already looks like a thing of the past. Most small businesses these days start as WhatsApp-first or Instagram-first.
Running a small business, especially the one or two-person operations, is a challenging endeavor. Most entrepreneurs find themselves juggling various roles, from accounting to sales to customer service, often simultaneously. With smartphones becoming the epicenter of the universe for modern-day consumers, the business landscape has changed significantly.
Until a few years ago, the Mobile-First business was a relatively new concept. Now, that already looks like a thing of the past. Most small businesses these days start as WhatsApp-first or Instagram-first. This paradigm shift inevitably means the buyer journey begins with a WhatsApp Conversation or Instagram chat, more so for entrepreneurs without any retail location or formal online presence.
The Grind
The businesses spend a significant portion of their day engaging with current and potential customers through digital channels like WhatsApp, Instagram, and emails. Not surprisingly, the interactions are almost always the same, with somewhat templated answers—for example, the florist’s story from our previous post. Monique is a fantastic florist, and her flower arrangements are breathtaking. She does not have a storefront or a website and relies heavily on referrals and word of mouth for business. Her predicament? She spends 3-4 hours each day responding to the same inquiries about bouquet options, prices, delivery times, and more. While these conversations are crucial for securing potential business, they also leave her with little time to pursue her true passion, which is why she started her business in the first place.
Adding to the challenge is the constant distraction – we live in a world of instant gratification, which means when a new lead comes in, she must drop everything and rush to her phone to tap the same answers yet another time.
The businesses spend a significant portion of their day engaging with current and potential customers through digital channels like WhatsApp, Instagram, and emails. Not surprisingly, the interactions are almost always the same, with somewhat templated answers—for example, the florist’s story from our previous post. Monique is a fantastic florist, and her flower arrangements are breathtaking. She does not have a storefront or a website and relies heavily on referrals and word of mouth for business. Her predicament? She spends 3-4 hours each day responding to the same inquiries about bouquet options, prices, delivery times, and more. While these conversations are crucial for securing potential business, they also leave her with little time to pursue her true passion, which is why she started her business in the first place.
Adding to the challenge is the constant distraction – we live in a world of instant gratification, which means when a new lead comes in, she must drop everything and rush to her phone to tap the same answers yet another time.
Beyond the obvious solutions
One might assume that hiring a virtual assistant or setting up a chatbot could resolve this issue. Sadly, though, the reality is more complex. Traditional chatbots require defining intents and building decision trees, which is a cumbersome process. Most business owners do not even get to that point. The step before is to select the right tool, which means weighing different offerings for affordability, speed, security, ease of use, etc. The complexity often leads to frustration and abandoning the very idea. If they somehow manage to get past this myriad of confusing choices, the next step involves setting it up and then constantly fine-tuning to make the bot work for different buyer journeys. While doable, it is not the most efficient way to solve the challenge, especially for a non-technical person.
Additionally, consumers often hold negative perceptions of chatbots stemming from past encounters with clunky and unhelpful automated systems. As a small business owner, Monique couldn’t afford to provide her first-time customers with a subpar experience.
The road ahead
As we started brainstorming together to look for a potential solution, it became evident how much time she invested in repetitive tasks. This inspired us to address the problem from a fresh perspective. Monique’s business was a perfect use case for Daksha GPT. Our solution wasn’t to build a chatbot for the sake of it, nor did we want Monique to spend unnecessary time on this issue. Instead, we embarked on a journey into the realm of conversational retail, leveraging Generative AI and existing open-source and third-party frameworks.
Challenges to overcome
Monique’s business primarily relied on Instagram and WhatsApp, given the absence of a physical store or webshop.
Payment handling was manual and cumbersome, involving sending Tikki/Stripe links and waiting for payments before confirming orders.
Order tracking was pretty much non-existent or manual.
Retrieving details of past orders involved scrolling endlessly through conversations, contacts, and channels.
Being a small business, she was working with a very limited budget.
Existing pieces of the puzzle
Monique already had an archive of past conversations which we could use as a data source for Daksha GPT to train AI, enhancing its capacity to provide responses in future interactions. Even though manual, most of the payments were digital via Stripe and Tikkie. The photos of past works artfully displayed her floral creations, serving as a compelling visual portfolio. Lastly, customer testimonials corresponding to individual products and floral arrangements that would allow us to create credibility to her business during interactions.
The Daksha approach
We adopted an objective approach to the project, while continually challenging ourselves to find innovative solutions. For example –
When a business has historical data of past conversations, it should be enough to provide context for future discussions. Why should we set up the bot intents and trees manually?
If the business owner doesn’t have an e-commerce website or sophisticated software, the customer should still be able to complete the transaction without the manual payment links and invoice requests.
Craft a buyer journey that offers a positive and guided experience, emulating human interaction rather than a robotic one.
Ensure that solution is user-friendly, eliminating the need for technical expertise in setup and usage, including automatically sending new conversations to the AI training module
Solution
Our approach combined various open-source and existing commercial offerings to create a robust yet affordable tool adaptable to different buyer journeys.
For the core conversation, we used LangChain and an open-source language model to train AI with historical data and create answers for the most common questions.
Monique didn’t have a website, yet we wanted to handle the end-to-end journey, including the commerce component. Rather than reinventing the wheel and creating a custom solution, we used a ghost WordPress and WooCommerce installation to manage all the products, inventory, subscriptions, offers, and catalogs.
Using WordPress/WooCommerce at the core also meant we had a prebuilt system for order tracking, sending notifications, and leveraging existing plugins for anything and everything.
We didn’t build the website front, but this tech stack gave us the scalability to do it in the future.
The solution needed to work across all channels. We used Rasa to deploy it on FB, WhatsApp, and Instagram.
A custom AI-driven recommendation engine.
AWS for hosting the ghost commerce solution.
Result: Customer Journey 2.0
When a customer starts a conversation, Daksha GPT automatically creates a response from the past discussions. The aim is to gather enough data by asking the right questions and defining the key parameters such as desired price range, occasion, etc. Based on the collected data, it uses a recommendation engine (custom) to query Ghost WooCommerce Installation and suggest the most suitable products with pictures. The system automatically shows testimonials and reviews for individual products. Once user selects a product, Daksha generates a payment link with Stripe or Tikki, allowing users to complete transactions within the conversation interface. On successful payment, the orders are registered into WooCommerce, handling email notifications through various plugins and built-in systems. On order completion, system automatically requests feedback and reviews using the TrustPilot plugin. The customer can request human intervention at any point, and the manual responses are funneled into training data.
Solution highlights
Leveraging existing open-source and third-party solutions, primarily free, instead of reinventing the wheel.
Offering a highly robust solution using proven technologies with scalability.
Rapid setup, development, and deployment.
Very affordable given minimum custom development.
Multichannel capability with a centralized core, thanks to Rasa and WooCommerce.
Seamless integration of modules, encompassing posts, pictures, and reviews, for an elevated customer experience.
Aftermath
Monique’s daily time spent on repetitive tasks has been reduced to approx. 30 minutes, compared to the earlier 3-4 hours a day.
An elevated buyer journey, marked by increased efficiency and customer satisfaction.
A stronger brand with more frequent reviews/feedback, faster payments, improved cash flow, and overall customer contentment.
Sales increased by an impressive 17% over the past three months, thanks to instant responses, better user experience and end-to-end automation.
Monique gained more time to brainstorm business expansion ideas, escaping the chaos of constant interruptions. With the new Daksha solution ready, Monique says of herself that she is enjoying her work much more again.
The mental peace! Well, we can’t put a price on that! Can we?
Monique’s success story is a small example of the potential for AI-driven solutions to revolutionize businesses. If you resonate with Monique’s challenges, consider contacting one of our project managers for a free consultation. Rest assured; we’ll have more than a few creative ideas to help you overcome your unique business hurdles.
By Maheep Gupta – I think of business challenges as puzzles and I love crafting simple yet elegant solutions without reinventing the wheel. User experience is a huge part of my work. A solution is not a solution unless it looks kickass and offers an amazing UX.
Understanding the AI Shift: Equipping Your Team for TomorrowThe story goes beyond this client’s unique journey; it underscores a crucial lesson often overlooked in AI integration—the significance of the people using it. In the swiftly evolving AI landscape, the tale encourages teams to consider exploring this transformative technology sooner rather than later for sustained relevance.
