Seeing eye to AI

Artificial intelligence has started to transform our lives significantly. As a thought leader in AI, Bosch aims to either AI-enable or AI-manufacture all of its products by 2025. Think smart ovens, self-driving cars, or smart factories—AI is creating new stories every day. Bosch approached us with the idea of evolving a chatbot to tell these stories on its website. In fact, the Bosch team had already started implementing some stories, but needed a hand.

A Bot Turning Mature

We were happy to help! Frizz, Bosch’s storytelling chatbot, needed to captivate users with the fascinating world of AI, using compelling narratives. As conversation designers, we ensured that Frizz welcomes visitors into dialog, guiding them through the stories, all while maintaining its envisioned behavior. Thus, Frizz transformed from a proof-of-concept into a fully-fledged bot with personality, built on state-of-the-art, easy-to-maintain and scalable workflows, pointing users in the right direction around the clock.

By enriching the chat with videos and images, users get an even deeper insight into the groundbreaking work Bosch carries out every day. When you chat with Frizz, you can travel to the ISS and learn why space is great for sensor testing, or instruct a smart oven to bake a flawless cake. You’ll learn about the senses of self-driving cars and how they’re educated in autonomous driving, or even how they can locate a parking space for you.

Inviting Users to Get to Know AI

Frizz is an invitation to get to know AI, and thanks to its conversational, approachable nature, the bot also presents itself as an AI ambassador. Being sensitive to possible concerns when it comes to AI, Frizz also addresses topics such as ethics and the importance of the technology to always remain transparent. In this way, the chatbot helps to alleviate fears that may arise when dealing with AI.

In fact, Frizz is well liked. Users spend an average of 9 minutes with the charming little fridge, which proves that trusting in the power of conversation allows you to connect with your users and respond to their needs.

Looking Ahead and Into the Future

By the way: we did not just optimize the existing story content and produced more capable conversation flows in the bot platform. On top of that we also worked to position the conversational interface on the bosch.com homepage by designing concepts for future-proof interaction and accessibility, like voice-first approaches, a more website-integrated chat window and more holistic access of website content through a conversational guide.

Why not find out for yourself? Frizz will be happy to tell you stories about AI. By the way: It’s worth checking back here every now and then to learn about other exciting projects we’re working on for Bosch.

Back

A Chatbot for lexoffice – The Conversational Sales Booster

Playing a Pivotal Role

Chatbots come and go. But why? Because they often only serve short-term goals. This also seemed to be the case with chatbot Lui in 2019, but the bot proved us wrong. lexoffice, Germany’s leading accounting software for freelancers and entrepreneurs by business software provider Lexware, planned a discount campaign.

Within this campaign, customers were able to influence how long the discount of 100 percent would apply. The more new customers bought lexoffice during the promotion period, the longer they could benefit from the discount, including existing customers who recommended the product to others.

Smart and Interactive—a Complex Discount System Made Simple

This complex discount system had to be integrated into the website. And what better way to present a complex product than with a smart chatbot? Lui made sure that users didn’t have to click through long explanations or FAQ. Instead, the pleasant little figure guided and informed them in a conversational, approachable way.

“It was exciting to develop a vision and concept for our chatbot Lui, ranging from campaigns to pre-sales and support. The team at think moto had a great understanding of our business model and was a fantastic partner to work with.”

Simon Reuvers, Marketing Manager, lexoffice

Lui Paid Off—lexoffice Had 41 Percent Increase in Sales

Lui turned out to be a real sales expert. Of the 40 percent who got in touch with Lui, around 12 percent became new lexoffice customers. With a conversion rate of 4.5 percent, Lui was well above the average of the traditional lexoffice website and 41 percent above the previous year’s Black Friday campaign. On Cyber Monday, more licenses were sold than ever before.

Benefitting from Conversational Experience

Lui was so convincing that lexoffice decided that the bot should stay. In fact, over the next 4 years of its existence, Lui evolved to represent the lexoffice universe. We fed the chatbot content so that it was able to help with presales and support questions and guide different user groups to relevant information and products, while living up to its unique bot personality.

Refining Lui

Lui continued to evolve. In 2022, one of the main tasks of the bot was to become a real advisor and help users find the right lexoffice product. For this, we developed guided flows to walk users through step-by-step. In an easily digestible way, Lui asked what they needed from a product and made recommendations accordingly.

In this way, the chatbot not only became more sophisticated on the conversational level, but we also reworked the widget itself. For the user interface, we developed product cards to present the right product in an eye-catching way and revised the galleries showing the most important features or rewards. In addition, users were given the option to rate Lui.

Finally, we integrated lexoffice’s intercom help center into Lui, making it really smart. We also developed a formula that automatically displayed the changes we made in Cognigy — the conversational AI platform Lui ran on — in Google Sheets.

In the end, Lui was online for 4 years – a considerable lifespan for a chatbot. That’s why we’ll always remember Lui as just that: a remarkably successful, charming character that we won’t be the only ones to miss — and that taught us a thing or two about conversational AI.

Our Services for lexoffice

Chatbot Strategy

Marketing Strategy

UX/UI Design

Visual Design

Motion Design

Conversation Design

Conversation Development

Frontend Development

Chatbot Analytics

Work Case: Conversational Experience

Bosch

A Chatbot as a Storyteller — a Scalable Conversational Redesign for Bosch