OnDuka

A salesperson that never sleeps

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Inspiration

We received a request from a shop owner that needed a chatbot for his business / shop due to this covid-19 lockdown period, this is where everything get started and how we get inspired on what if we bring a solution that will enable any shop owner to create chatbot using OnDuka instantly available on facebook messenger by just few clicks ? from the request and the actual problem that businesses are facing and a great opportunity to open for these businesses to the use of chatbot as an extra hand and a way to sell easily online.

What it does

OnDuka is a chatbot that sells goods and services to businesses customers. It is an automated salesperson that never sleeps. While business owners or physical shops/stores are closed, OnDuka will keep interacting with customers, following up and selling items on behalf of the business owner via their Facebook Pages.

How we built it

Shop owners will come to the OnDuka website to connect the OnDuka Chatbot to their shop pages. The chatbot that uses NLP/NLU and fetch products from the store/shop database. The chatbot helps customers navigate the shop/store items, ask questions, subscribe for notification of new arrival, discount and other things that need notification. All these are done using One-Time Notifications, and Quick Replies but we are also working to implement Private Replies that will send the customers to talk directly to the chatbot.

The website helps shop owners to post on their Shop page wall, in their Groups, broadcast to all customers

Challenges we ran into

Time was not enough to have everything we wanted present. We were not able to implement Private Reply but we are already working on it

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are just starting a lot of work yet to be done but the work we have done so far shows us our strength and tells us that we can do it, that makes us feel proud of. The other thing that made us more proud is the smile we saw on the face of a shop owner when we invited him for a test and he gave us great feedback. We had a lot to learn but we decided to challenge ourselves to build it because we believe our product is going to impact business positively.

What we learned

We have learnt a lot about retail businesses how it functions but how to use Facebook technologies with almost all the features they offer. Our platform is completely built using Facebook technologies only.

What's next for OnDuka

Covid-19 has come with a need for all businesses either small or big to be online. Having so much interest in AI for good and Chatbot we want to make these accessible to them to help SMBs, Retailers in Increasing Sales, Reducing Costs and Automate Facebook Support.

We are still building and would like to launch it next month, we tried to get some retailer businesses interested and they are eagerly waiting for the product to be ready for use.

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