Improving Customer Service and Sales Automation with Zwiz.ai

Zwiz.ai provides AI Chatbots and analytics tools that assist SMEs and enterprises to automatically engage with received messages in real time.  In this interview we hear from Chanakarn Chinchatchawal, Co-Founder & CEO of  Zwiz.ai on the advantages of utilizing this innovative technology in sales and marketing.

Please tell us about your journey into technology and how you started Zwiz.ai?

After completing a Master’s Degree in Computing (Artificial Intelligence) in London I returned home to utilize what I had learnt in Artificial Intelligence to help people and businesses in Thailand.  At that time the big platforms that operate in conversation, chat commerce and chatting, which are Facebook and LINE, opened for developers to connect to their systems which was the starting point where I became interested in joining and partnering with them.

I approached two friends from the university in Thailand to join me with the idea to write a simple chatbot program to connect to Facebook and LINE to respond to people’s questions and answer automatically.  The first year of operating was challenging as we didn’t have any funding, we tried to find an accelerator and incubator but there are very little available in Thailand.

We then engaged with a Telco accelerator who advised us and helped in building the brand and product.  The second year became easier as we acquired some clients and could focus on the business model instead of only on the technology, learning about gaining clients and advertising.  That year we grew from 100 customers to about 4 000, now we have evolved to over 40 000 clients that use our platform.

What solutions do you provide to customers?

Our technology is a robot that helps answer on a customer’s channel, for example if you are a business that sells products to customers in Thailand most would use a social platform for sales such as Facebook.  All commerce and conversation is done via Facebook so if they do not have any tools, they would need to stand by at all times to answer customer queries and conclude sales.  Our platform helps in answering the customer enquiry, displays the product and help collect the payment.  Our customers range from small to large businesses, SMEs to large enterprises.

How can marketing and customer service teams derive maximum benefit from using your technology?

There are two divisions of clients that come to us, the marketing division and customer service sector. For marketing the focus is on the data received from the chatbot, they would like to know the statistics of how many users chat on Facebook through the platform, how many cat about the product, the service, complaints, and other things.  Once they know this, they can group clients to send personalized messages with promotions or advertising as the potential client has already engaged interest through chatting directly to their platform.

Within customer service they don’t always have people to stand by at all times and SMEs cannot hire people to be available 24/7.  Afterhours they would require some tools, chatbot or robot to help answer simple questions and advise them that an admin person would be available to assist them during operation hours for example.  It will also assist the admin person in responding to simple questions and repeated questions which they don’t need to answer all the time.

What are the biggest opportunities for enterprises to leverage Conversational AI?

There are two parts, the customer service and marketing.  By receiving the data that the customer has shared with them, they gain insight into the user data and behaviour. We help the enterprise analyze this data and provide them with their insights and reporting.  The data also enables them to remarket to their customer.  This is an added opportunity as when you use human interaction your admin person may not collect the data or have the tools to analyze the data in detail.

Can you give us 3 key factors that drive a positive experience overall?

The first factor is having a clear purpose when you build a chatbot.  Some people use the chatbot for commerce which means they focus only on the ability to sell and closing the sale.  Others use a chatbot for service meaning the focus would be mainly on responding to questions asked.  Having a clear purpose is important as we cannot build a chatbot with multiple purposes for now.  For example, if you had a restaurant you want to build a chatbot that responds to restaurant relate queries, you cannot build a chatbot to answer hotel related questions if you want to combine them it would be challenging.

The second factor is the user experience, so not only the Q&A that they answer correctly but the ability to advise the client that for a complex question it will transfer to a human as the Chatbot only knows simple things.  It needs to make people aware of the Chatbot capability and that it may not be able to address sensitive issues like complaints or something that needs human intervention.

Lastly, for the overall experience we always have our UX team test and train the chatbot before we before we deploy or go live in with the platform.  Testing is essential as a Chatbot cannot be smart if you don’t train and test them, you cannot just build and leave them there.  More effort is required in developing a Chatbot than other platforms like websites or apps that you build once and are completed – for a Chatbot we need to take care of them and train them.

As a business leader how do you prepare for an AI-centric world?

For our company, we position ourselves as an AI provider and consultant, in an AI-centric world there may be some problems faced related to AI like AI conflict with human or AI mistakes.  Our position is to be the problem solver and consultant related to this field.  There is always room for problem solving and consulting in the future meaning we cannot rely on AI for everything, there may be some error that requires revision and review so we will be there to help consult and solve the problem.

Which Conversational AI-related technology trend do you think will have the biggest impact in your industry in the coming years?

For now, and the next few years it will be conversational commerce.  We have a lot of businesses, especially SMEs using the AI chatbot for sales automation utilizing tools to answer their simplest and most frequently repeated customer service queries and increase sales overnight.