Case Study: Chatbot Jacob

ESOMAR

As a renowned membership organization, ESOMAR serves as a hub for professionals and organizations in the market research and data analysis sectors. Through its community of like-minded individuals, ESOMAR provides opportunities for networking, learning, and advancement. From hosting events and webinars to publishing research papers and articles, ESOMAR keeps its members up-to-date on the latest industry trends and developments. In addition, ESOMAR's extensive knowledge base contains over 10,000 pieces of content on various topics, including big data, marketing, and artificial intelligence, which are accessible to its more than 40,000 members. Regardless of experience level, ESOMAR is a valuable resource for anyone seeking to grow their skills and knowledge in market research and data analysis.

The Era of AI: An Intro

Artificial intelligence is drastically changing our outlook on technology soon, there will come a time when no aspect of our lives is left uninfluenced by for all intents and purposes AI in some way, which essentially is quite significant. But the kind of good news is, most of these changes are affecting us in beneficial ways, and advancements in AI technology are significantly helping businesses for the most part to improve their means of operation.

One innovative application of AI is the development of AI chatbots. Every company that strives for greatness has to offer the most value to its clients in the shortest amount of time. For that reason, AI chatbots are widely used in business to boost sales, enhance customer service, and develop a brand voice. But what precisely is an AI chatbot? To put it as simply as possible, it is an artificially intelligent robot or computer program that can communicate with people by using natural language processing and machine learning. AI chatbots have a lot of potential and businesses are now starting to realize the advantages of utilizing chatbots to enhance the consumer experience through customer care and online sales.

Similarly, dev-UP has used the power of AI to help ESOMAR take its business to a whole new level! ESOMAR is a not-for-profit membership organization for people engaged in the market, opinion and social research, and data analysis. There are numerous customer queries received by the organization on a daily basis, and we have created a chatbot that significantly improves the lives of our customers by making their experiences easier and more convenient.

How Was Chatbot Jacob Built?

Chatbot Jacob was built using a platform called Xenioo but we went the extra mile and extended the platform by using our own AI models. This, in return, enables chatbot Jacob to also handle NLPs and answer a diverse range of questions. It’s a unique AI chatbot that is guaranteed to make ESOMAR’s customer service more efficient, user-friendly, and accessible to a wide variety of people. These chatbots are actually pretty simple and rely on some fundamental rules in order to determine the best response for a given customer scenario. They are also referred to as expert systems and typically use pre-programmed if-then statements.

Key Capabilities

Chatbot Jacob can search through all the different platforms of ESOMAR and present to the customer the exact information they require. ESOMAR, being a business community of insights and analytics, has several platforms on its website that are often not easy to navigate, especially for a newcomer. There’s Directory, About, Events, Reports and Publications, and multiple other tabs to view. Importantly, ESOMAR has a blog website called Research World that is specifically focused on marketing. Skimming through all these different pages and looking for a specific piece of relevant information can be challenging and if we’re being honest, not everyone has the time for that either. Wouldn’t life be a whole lot easier if you could just direct your question to an AI chatbot and have it go through multiple pages of information to bring you exactly what you require? That’s what chatbot Jacob does flawlessly and without wasting a minute of your time.

Another amazing feature of chatbot Jacob is that you can ask it questions that you do not find under the FAQ tab on the website. FAQs cover a range of frequently-occurring queries. You’ll find plenty of help through them, but in case your question is different from the list of questions we’ve already answered for you, chatbot Jacob will be at your service!

Using NLP, we have built chatbot Jacob to be able to link different variations of the same query and direct the user to the relevant piece of information. So, for example, if a customer asks “where do I find my invoice?”, “invoice – where can I find it?” or “is there a way to find my invoice,” then the chatbot will make the relevant connection and guide the user to the right answer, which might sound like “the invoice can be found in such and such location.” That means even if you feel like you don’t have the exact words to put your query in, you can rely on our AI bot to make the connection and direct you to the required information.

Chatbot Jacob is more special and helpful than the regular AI chatbots out there – at the backend, it is connected to like five or six data sources, which means it is immediately directed to an APL data hub, which in turn contains five or six APIs.

Objective

The primary objective of chatbot Jacob is quite simple: answer any and every question a customer might have comprehensively, and ensure their query is resolved. Customer service is one of the most important aspects of a business and without the needs of customers being promptly addressed, it is difficult for any organization to truly prosper. That’s why the aim of chatbot Jacob is to make customerservice the utmost priority for ESOMAR, and it does so by making answers available to all the possiblequestions customers might have.

Finding relevant content and information on a website can sometimes be challenging, especially if one is new to the platform. People usually want their queries answered right away without having to go through any extra steps that’s exactly what chatbot Jacob does. You enter your question into the chatbot and Jacob will direct you to the most appropriate answer that fully satisfies your concern.

Challenges

Chatbot Jacob, as supportive and user-friendly as it is, comes with certain challenges. The main problemdevelopers have had in the production of this AI chatbot is combining data sources and simultaneouslyoptimizing speed and accuracy. The AI model has to handle the combination of answering differentversions of the same questions or maybe even random, unconnected words. People will inevitablysearch for whatever makes sense to them and the job of the AI model is to send the words to the rightAPI in order to search through five or six different data sources correctly.

Benefits

To say chatbot Jacob will make the lives of ESOMAR customers easier would be an understatement. It will undoubtedly make the process of looking for relevant information much simpler, which will result in a more satisfied customer base. Quicker help, easier navigation, no need for long waiting times on phone calls or having to type out emails what else does a customer ask for?

Moreover, conventional customer service is pretty limited in the sense that you cannot call up an individual and ask them for help 24/7. In contrast, AI chatbots provide their services at all times. It doesn’t matter what time of the day it is or where you’re located your query will not have to wait hours before getting resolved!

Not only do the customers benefit from the existence of such a versatile chatbot but the businesses significantly reduce their costs too by not wasting essential resources on activities that can easily be automated. Instead of answering the same questions over and over again manually, why not use the valuable human labor and time for much more productive processes?

Thanks to the ever-evolving process of deep learning, chatbots can play out dynamic interactions with customers and operate successfully automatically in various complex contexts and repeat the process as many times as required!

Chatbot Jacob is set to go into production in the first week of January 2023 after being developed for almost one year. In the long term, the AI model can be used elsewhere and the next step going into the future is to integrate the model into other platforms