What Happened
The Black Tux, a startup specializing in online tuxedo and suit rentals, has created a chatbot that hands out discounts based on school grades. Available on Facebook Messenger, the Suit Up Bot “uses Optical Character Recognition (OCR) via the Tesseract OCR engine” to scan the report cards that customers uploaded and authenticate them for potential discounts. (In our test, the bot couldn’t recognize the random report card we found online but proceeded to offer up a code for $20 off at The Black Tux’s website.)
What Brands Need To Do
This new chatbot is a fun example of designing ecommerce chatbots. Inspired by the nostalgia of receiving rewards for good grades, the discount scheme fits well with the brand’s young adults-centric customer demo. As consumers continue to embrace messaging apps and chatbot services, brands need to consider developing useful bots with distinct features and personalities to reach customers on the popular messaging apps they’re already using.
How We Can Help
The Lab has extensive experience in building chatbots to reach consumers on messaging interfaces. So much so that we’ve built a dedicated conversational practice called Dialogue. The NiroBot we built in collaboration with Ansible for Kia is a good example of how Dialogue can help brands build a conversational customer experience, supercharged by our stack of technology partners with best-in-class solutions and an insights engine that extracts business intelligence from conversational data.
If you’d like to learn more about how to effectively reach consumers on conversational interfaces, or to leverage the Lab’s expertise to take on related client opportunities within the IPG Mediabrands, please contact our Client Services Director Samantha Holland (samantha@ipglab.com) to schedule a visit to the Lab.
Source: US Weekly
Header image courtesy of The Black Tux