Soylent Creates Conversational Virtual Assistant For Its Online Shop

What Happened
Meal-in-a-bottle substitute maker Soylent has created a virtual assistant named Trish for its online shop to guide customers through the purchase process. Instead of using natural language input, Trish offers a menu of topics and answers that customers can click through to learn more about Soylent and its different product flavors. Once they select a flavor they like, Trish will prompt customers with a question of how many bottles they’d like to purchase and redirect them to the shopping cart for checkout.

What Brands Need To Do
Despite being a fairly low-tech version of a chatbot, Soylent’s new virtual shop keeper adds a conversational touch to the process of product discovery and site navigation of its online store. The addition of this conversational layer fosters a kind of user-friendliness that separates the customer experience from other online shopping experiences, where customers are bombarded with tons of options to choose from and left to their own devices. More brands, especially those that sells to customers directly online, need to evaluate their online customer experience and consider adopting conversational interfaces to guide customers with a simpler, more intuitive experience.

How We Can Help
The Lab has extensive experience in building Alexa Skills and chatbots to reach consumers on conversational 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 ([email protected]) to schedule a visit to the Lab.

 


Source: Soylent