One of the instruments making our marketing agency more efficient is our Telegram chatbot. Today, we’ll review how bots can be used by companies following such model.

Introduction

Interaction with potential and existing clients is one of the most labour-intensive activities, as is the case for most agencies. The success of any project depends on how well you handle requests and respond to questions that arise during the work process.

As we attracted more and more clients, it became obvious that some issues came up time and time again — and often from people within the same company. This was when we realised that we needed a “knowledge warehouse” that could help current and potential clients with the basics. At first, our blog took on that role.

We posted informative articles that answered frequently asked questions like when is a good time to post, how to write clickable headlines, and even how to deal with writer’s block.

It fixed the problem for a while, but as we grew, our needs did too. Our blog didn’t only have content marketing articles, but also pieces about our vision of client interaction and business. After a few years, we had more than 60 articles, which made it difficult to find relevant information, even though we could still answer questions with direct links. But frankly, we even found it hard work to get our hands on them too, so we decided to audit our content and create that “knowledge warehouse” with the answers to questions that really matter to clients.

At this point, we realised that a robot could do it better than we ever could, so we created our marketer bot. As we developed the program, it became clear that it could do more than we originally planned.

Tips for fixing simple issues

Our first idea was to create a database of common questions and answers for our clients that would reduce the workload and free us up for more pressing tasks.

There are two approaches to accomplishing this task. The first one is through “smart” software that can analyse user queries and learn over time how to resolve more questions. Nevertheless, such a chatbot is quite an investment and requires a lot of advanced programming knowledge. The second option was simpler: use conversation scripts. This type of system is much easier and cheaper, so we chose it.

Once again, we compiled a list of popular questions about content marketing like “What should we write about?”, “Does the timing of posts affect their popularity?”, and “How do we work with negative comments?” and moved on from there.

A simple interface that gets answers to typical content marketing questions

Potential clients finally have the means to get answers when they need them. At the moment, only our new clients get the pleasure of playing with our bot, but the number of questions to actual staff has already fallen by 20%.

Automation for Better Usability

Now we know that the bot is not enough, and this system has much more potential. But it can already theorise and provide answers as well as analyse the quality of content and give recommendations.

We started building a bilingual bot (English — Russian) from the outset so we had to integrate a system to analyse both languages. Fortunately, messenger platforms allow third-party services to connect to their bots through open APIs.

Ultimately, our marketer bot is able to check the quality of Russian and English articles (using the IBM Tone Analyzer for the latter).

Our bot can analyse articles using the IBM Tone Analyzer API

Routing incoming requests with precision

After reading the tips and trying to create the content, clients can still need some expert advice. Even here, the chatbot can cut costs by sending a request directly to the right employee.

Even a simple form with relevant questions has a lot of value for a company: it helps decide what issues the client wants to solve, what budget they have, and so forth. The answers then determine what employee is best suited to work with the customer.

A chatbot briefs a potential client

Of course, no one likes filling in forms and questionnaires, especially those with a lot of mandatory fields, but it’s easy to fix: just get rid of all those troublesome fields.

Conclusion

From our experience, bots can benefit agencies. Businesses can even automate certain routine tasks and facilitate client access to a knowledge database. This is an excellent way to cut costs and free up time for staff to accomplish more valuable tasks.