Salonius — A Smart, Beautiful Bot!
The perfect demo chatbot
In previous blog posts, we’ve promoted our demo chatbots which are within our own chatbot. It’s a very small example of a bot, but just a demo… not the real deal.
That’s all changed! We’ve launched Salonius — our full demo chatbot that’s ready to be tried and enjoyed.
Try our Salonius demo bot now: https://m.me/saloniusdemobot
Better than a website?
When you open up the Salonius bot the first thing you’re met with is an intro by Maria, our fictional salon’s customer relations manager.
Providing a human face to a bot is important. In a salon there would be someone who oversees and interacts with their chatbot, so you may as well make it clear who that person is from the start.
Maria offers you a choice of three things her chatbot can help you with — booking, info about treatments and Q&As.
What you may also notice lurking at the bot of the blog is a menu. With a Messenger chatbot, you can build a menu, just like with a website. Your users can quickly and easily flick to different parts of the bot and get the help or information they require really easily with the menu.
A chatbot is in many ways better than a website. It’s more interactive, it’s more intelligent and it’s often quicker to use.
Smart booking
There are two stand-out features of this chatbot. This first is the booking system.
In our previous salon bot iteration, there was a booking request system. It told the salon roughly when you want to book and they have to follow it up. Helpful, but not seamless.
In our full Salonius bot, there is a full booking system. When you go to book you’re asked which treatment you want to book an appointment for and then if you’re a new or existing bot booking user.
The power of the bot is that every new booking user is asked for their phone number and email address and then this data is stored along with their name. This means that when you book for a second time you never need to type in those bits of data again, making booking seamless.
When you click on ‘Book Now’ it opens up the booking system from Calendly. We’ve constructed a demo salon booking page in Calendly and you are able to actually try it out and book an appointment.
The best bit? You know how you had to give your email address and phone number to the bot? Well, when you go to book in Calendly, the bot has already told Calendly your name, email address and phone number, making it really quick to book (even quicker for returning customers!).
Our final party piece, once you’ve booked the bot opens up a payment page where you can make a payment for your booking now. This can be done in Calendly, but it is interesting to showcase how you can make and receive payments in the bot.
A truly smart bot
Our second stand out feature is our AI chatting. With our previous chatbots, they’ve relied on questions and buttons to help customers. If someone types in a different question, it breaks.
Not anymore! With the Salonius bot, we’ve integrated Google’s machine learning. Now customers can either use the buttons in the bot or ask their own questions.
Rather than be led down a path by the bot, it opens up the system to be truly smart, truly interactive and truly helpful!
Using such a smart system is not complicated. All we have to do is tell the AI the sorts of questions your clients might ask and the appropriate answers to give and it learns from your examples.
Say a customer wants to know when you’re open. They might ask the bot “When are you open?” With a bit of training, the bot can quickly reply with a pre-written answer of “We’re open 9am to 6pm Monday to Friday.”
Clever, but what if the client asks a different question, such as “Are you open?” The bot can recognise the question as being similar to the other one we trained it on and provide the same response.
How about if the client asks “Are you open on Monday?” We can train the bot to know that question and provide the answer about opening days and times. When the client asks “Are you open on Wednesday?” The machine learning will recognise Wednesday is a day of the week like Monday and offer exactly the same response.
Sound complex? It’s really not. We train the chatbot by offering it a range of questions a client might ask and what the right response would be to each question and let the bot go away and learn from the training.
In summary
Try our new demo chatbot today. If you’ve ever tried one of our bots before or another chatbot, it doesn’t matter. You need to try this demo chatbot!
With a smart booking system built in and an even smarter, machine learning-led chat experience, the Salonius chatbot is a truly awesome experience.
Try our Salonius demo bot now: https://m.me/saloniusdemobot
