Chatbot start-up founder markets product...

If you've been on the internet long enough, you have probably engaged with a person over a chat that turned out to be a robot. Well, those are chatbots, and you can spot them on practically every customer support live chat service. While bots are often looked down upon, especially for being a little deceptive and dicey on some platforms, sometimes they have their perks too.

Ish Jindal, founder of Tars, recently sent a wedding invite to his WhatsApp contacts – with the help of bots. Jindal put up a WhatsApp story carrying a link to the chatbot portal. Upon clicking the link, users were directed to a chat screen, where a bot unveiled all the details of wedding, and also gave some glimpse into the couple's lives.

A very creative use of bots, to say the least. We reached out to Ish Jindal to know how the idea came about, and what the intent was. He says, “Everybody these days makes videos for their upcoming wedding and they share it across their contacts. I wanted to do something similar, and my co-founder suggested that I use our own product to do the invite. So rather than doing it over a video or a boring pdf, I decided to go with an automated chat.”

Chatbots have been around for more than 50 years now, with the first chatbot coming into existence in the 1960s, thanks to MIT professor Joseph Weizenbaum. Through the years, bots have found their presence in various avenues, primarily aimed to operate customer services across categories. However, people have extrapolated these services to some fancy stretches. In weddings for example, there is a growing trend of couples inviting people for their wedding through chatbots.

Since Tars has its own service of bot-invitations, we asked Jindal to give us some insights on how it works. He says, “If a couple wants to invite their contacts to a wedding, they share some basic information like venue, dates, personal details and pictures. And in return, the guests share their details of arrival, or confirmation, or flight details, et cetera. All of this can be done over an automated chat. An entire conversation is made out of this and the bot asks all the right questions.”

But, we wondered if there was a marketing side to this. In a conversation with afaqs!, Jindal expounded on the effort and gave us some insights on how it all works for marketers. Leading a bot service company for marketers, Tars, Jindal pointed out that weddings are one simple example of how bots can be leveraged to garner attention. “From a marketer's perspective, chatbots are of assistance to NBFCs and financial institutes. And such brands can use it for acquisition and retention of their customers. So these FinTech organisations can do the entire customer transaction journey – all within the chatbots.”

He adds, “It's also prevalent in the retail segment. For instance, Big Bazaar has sales every now and then. Big Bazaar uses what's called a smart search trail campaign. So, for instance, they wanted to give away coupons, we crafted the entire journey over a chatbot. And for it's human nature and its customer friendly UI, the campaign flourished. So from a marketer's standpoint, chatbots lead to more conversion rate. And that leads to more revenue.”