How Bots are Good for Business. Bot Summit Winnipeg 2017 Takeaways

On June, 16 we hosted our first ever Bot Summit 2017 in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada to bring Winnipeg businesses together and ideate what bots can accomplish for their respective organizations.

Bots can be implemented in many capacities across an organization, and we really wanted to get that across to our attendees. That is why the event was formatted the way that it was.

Tamara Pound from New Media Manitoba was our master of ceremonies, so she officially announced the commencement of Bot Summit 2017. Next, the Master of Code Canada team took to the stage in this order:

The Current State of Bots, Messaging Platforms, and Online Consumer Behaviors

By Dustin Refvik (Co-Founder, Master of Code Canada)

The Takeaway(s): The importance of messenger applications. Messenger apps have surpassed social networks in terms of monthly users. Also, chatbots that live inside messenger applications boast an 85% message open rate (compared to email at 20%).

Messenger apps will continue to grow, and chatbots will continue to gain in popularity as AI, NLP, and general bot processes continue to improve.

Marketing, Sales and Lead Generation with Chatbots

By Dmitry Gritsenko (CEO, Master of Code)

The Takeaway(s): Bots increase user engagement, are easier (and cheaper) to launch than traditional websites and apps, and bots reduce your marketing costs drastically compared to other mediums. Bots boast a coast per click (CPC) of $0.07, compared to mobile at $1.80 and web at $0.93. The personalized experiences that bots create for your users is one of the things that makes them so valuable and unique.

Bot Applications for Improving Customer Service and Support

By Carah Campbell (Account Manager, Master of Code Canada)

The Takeaway(s): How Bots can increase customer satisfaction by answering their questions quickly and in their medium of choice (ie, Messenger or another messaging app). This is why we have been busy with labs projects lately and more to come on that later. Arguably the biggest takeaway is that bots can result in a 30% decrease in your customer service costs. Increasing efficiences and customer satisfaction? Bots really can do it all.

Bots and Business Process Improvements

By Ben Myers (UX Lead, Master of Code Canada)

The Takeaway(s): If your company isn’t using Slack, it should be just like the 77% of Fortune 100 companies on Slack. Additionally, bots within Slack allow you to centralize data, increase visibility into operations, and increase accountability as a team. Slack bots create better business processes for the backend of your organization, which creates a positive ripple effect across your company. Pretty cool, right?

Next was a rapid ideation session lead by inVision Edge. The purpose of the session was to get attendees thinking about bots in less than conventional capacities. inVision Edge used a variety of exercises including a word association exercise where we had to brainstorm words for a specific topic, and then link words of different topics together (this got pretty ridiculous, since the topics included “customer service” as well as “things that are red”). This session was great to really get people thinking about the applications of bots by brainstorming with individuals from other organizations and being pushed to think outside of the box.

The Biggest Takeaway We Had

A lot of great things happened at Bot Summit 2017, but the greatest takeaway we had was the surprising amount of backend development interest.

Many individuals tend to think of bots only in their forward-facing capacities, but not necessarily about what they can do behind the scenes in an organization. Ben did a great job of detailing how bots can help with human resources, inventory management, and task management (among other things) and that really got people thinking about where they could implement bots.