Simba Bot

The one bot businesses need to keep customers engaged, and get them help in real time - using the handover protocol API

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Inspiration

Over the years, a number of businesses have shut down due to low engagement ratio with their users. Globally, 1 in 10 businesses shut or close up due to issues relating to customer retention and engagement. The tendency to be a player in solving this issue is the key mother to the project idea for this solution, the Simba Bot.

What it does

Using the Messenger handover protocol API and quick replies, this bot is able to provide an unflinching customer support service for businesses (we partnered with DeliveryNow NG to test this beta version) whereby users can request for information about a specific business (DeliveryNow NG in this case), track orders, and reach out to a real human support via inbox (using the handover protocol API), or via phone call. The Simba Bot uses wit.ai to understand conversations, while it spurts out coded-in responses based on the expressions and intents it receives.

Even after taking back the control of a conversation, the bot sends the user a short NPS (Net Promoter Score) survey using quick replies which helps measure customer satisfaction after it takes back a conversation from a real human. The response of this survey is logged on Facebook Analytics, where the business can make meaningful decisions using the provided survey data.

How we built it

Wit.ai is used in powering the bot, it serves as the brain. The bot was setup using the Messenger Node SDK, while the whole project is written in NodeJS.

Challenges we ran into

Time was a major challenge, even though, we still work on this project day in day out, it isn't yet what we envision it to be.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Being able to write and run many conditions against the wit.ai entities in such a small amount of time, the project's GitHub commit history is a testament to this.

What we learned

It is not enough to write code for a virtual assistant, training the bot on wit.ai felt just as important as writing the code itself. And two members of the team were assigned this responsibility of training the wit.ai app.

What's next for Simba Bot

To integrate a seamless Messenger chat extension using the chat extensions API, this should afford businesses an advantage to process customer orders, monitor inventory, and process payments for customer orders all within the bot.

We do also have plans to reinvent the bot as a SaaS solution that not only houses support for a single business, but also provides real time support for businesses - while continuing to provide powerful analytics.

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