Botcopy Service Partner Spotlight
Botcopy Service Partner in the fitness category emerges from the pandemic in excellent shape.
Be sure to check out our Botcopy Service Partner Spotlight every month. Learn how top agencies and service providers deploy effective conversational AI products for their clients.
Recently, we had the privilege of interviewing Tim Sebold, founder & CEO of soolisAI.
“My philosophy is to start clients with chatbots and rigorously train them on websites and apps. The chat agents get very smart during this time. Later, it will be easy to extend those well-trained agents into voice if and when it becomes the primary medium of interaction.”
– Tim Sebold, CEO of soolisAI
Tim and his team have been Botcopy users for more than two years. It’s gratifying to witness his company’s well-deserved rise. soolisAI went from adding bots to a few health club sites to a dozen…to a hundred, and are now on the cusp of adding automated chats to thousands of websites.
I could say a lot more about soolisAI, but I’ll let Tim speak for himself, below. (If you have any follow-up questions, please reach out to tsebold@soolisai.com)
How do you describe soolisAI in one breath?
We’re an agency focused on chat and voice automation and we work with many health and fitness clients, but we also have clients outside of health and fitness.
What’s your company’s history in a nutshell?
Before becoming a chat automation company, we were a full-service digital marketing agency serving the health and fitness niche. We offered websites, paid search, landing pages, email, etc. We pivoted from being a conventional agency to focusing on providing AI services.
Interesting. What prompted you to make this rather bold move?
It all started when I bought my first Google Home. I remember thinking, “this technology is going to transform business. It’s going to be like the Jetsons where people and machines communicate through voice.” We love to get ahead of the trends, so we decided to go all-in on the AI aspect of customer service. That choice has started to pay off.
That’s excellent to hear. Who are some of your clients?
We work with Gold’s Gym and World Gym, many other local and national health club brands. We also work with American Barbell, probably the biggest distributor of barbells nationwide. Additionally, we serve other categories, the financial space, insurance [Buck Consultants], real estate, restaurants, etc.
Did you widen the net to other verticals because of the pandemic?
Partly, yes. When the pandemic hit, most health clubs shut down and investing in new tech was the last thing on their minds. We learned that we don’t want to be dependent on one category. So while health & fitness remains our biggest market and close to our hearts, we diversified into other spaces.
Smart. How do you pitch projects to prospective clients?
We often do a proof of concept by building a simple Dialogflow agent and Botcopy bot and embedding it on an online mockup of the client’s homepage. When clients can see and play with a well-produced proof of concept, they’re more amenable to testing it out on their live site. After that point, it comes down to whether the bot shows ROI, which it almost always does. Usually the ROI increases as bots learn from experience.
How do you make bots smarter over time?
As a service provider, we monitor the chat transcripts. We watch the conversations to see where the weaknesses occur. Then we can check in with the client, gather any pertinent info, and program that knowledge into the bot in less than an hour. Over time, the bot can handle more services without escalating to a live agent or a phone call. We also utilize Botcopy’s features to add page-specific prompts. The bot can respond to user behaviors and language settings which improves the UX and boosts engagement at the top of the funnel.
How did you learn to do all this? Making enterprise-level chat solutions and continually training them is an advanced move.
We started with Chatfuel, which is much easier for beginners, but we kept running into walls on what it could achieve. We looked for something more powerful and our research kept turning up Dialogflow, Dialogflow, Dialogflow. Then we had to find a way to get our Dialogflow agent onto a website in the form of a rich, custom web chat UI that had all the features we needed, which led us to signing up for a Botcopy subscription and using your SaaS. Finding the right stack definitely sped up our learning curve and allowed us to deploy some excellent products quickly.
What’s your message to companies that are skeptical or confused about why they should invest in conversational AI?
I would say this: as consumers, we want information whenever, wherever, and that’s what this technology provides. When we talk to new clients about adding a bot to their site, sometimes they try to put us in touch with their marketing department first. That’s a mistake. The appropriate department to talk with is usually operations because chat ROI is best measured by whether operations run more efficiently, at a lower cost.
Can you comment on voice UX versus chat?
It seems too early for the voice tech to take off for our client base. Screens and chat are an excellent way to automate service right now, in my opinion. That might change as voice UX improves. My philosophy is to start clients with chatbots and rigorously train them on websites and apps. These chat agents get very smart during this time. Then, it will be easy to extend those well-trained agents into voice use cases, if and when voice becomes a dominant medium of interaction.
I know you respect client confidentiality, but do you have any favorite stats you like to share?
What I can say is that a Hubspot study recently compared a landing page with a chatbot to see which was better at capturing relevant info. They found a 31% decrease in the cost of acquisition using chat over a form. Our clients experience roughly that at the outset, but here’s the thing: over time, the cost of acquisition gets lower and lower — it isn’t a fixed number.
Is the lower cost per acquisition a function of the bot getting smarter?
Yes, exactly. Plus, the nature of a chatbot is that it can intrinsically create rapport and build up trust before asking the user for personal details. You can put form fields right within the chat window, so a form, or a series of smaller forms, can come up at the right time, in the middle of a conversation. That way, you can create a comfort level, handle some FAQs, before asking the customer for something in return — like name and email address, or to schedule a tour. That’s the whole point, I think — the power of conversation as a means to boost engagement through give and take.
Any other tips you want to share with other agencies and service providers looking to expand or pivot into conversational AI?
Keep your bot’s responses short and sweet. When we first created conversational agents a lot of editing was needed. Our data showed that with chatbots, like so many things in life, less is more.
On that note, this is a perfect place to wrap it up. Thanks for chatting, Tim.
My pleasure, as always. Take care.
To learn more about soolisAI, visit soolisAI.com.
To become a Botcopy Service Partner or learn about agency benefits, discounts, and requirements, please visit https://www.botcopy.com/service-partnerships
You can also reach out to us at hello@botcopy.com to schedule a quick info session about Service Partnerships.
