Today, Claudius Herz and Daniel Mittendorf talk to Sophie about the use of a chatbot in sales at Berliner Verkehrsbetriebe. In this podcast episode, you can find out why the chatbot exists, what it has to do with “Hasta La Vista, Baby” and what her vision for the future is.
About Claudius Herz and Daniel Mittendorf
Claudius Herz is the founder and managing director of Beyto, a full-service provider for voice and conversational interfaces. He has been working in the digital marketing space since 2006 and first took a closer look at voicebots in 2018. Since then, the topic has stayed with him and Beyto was founded. Daniel Mittendorf has also been on board as CTO since the beginning of 2020 and takes care of technical matters such as the development and design of voicebots at Beyto. Before he started developing voicebots in 2017, he worked for many years in agencies and retail in the e-commerce sector.
This is Beyto
The name Beyto stands for beyond touch, i.e. everything that goes beyond the age of touch and smartphones, reports Claudius. The full-service provider for voice and conversational interfaces is based on two pillars. On the one hand, there is the classic consulting area, which covers the entire spectrum from discovery strategies to design, development, analysis and audits. The offering covers all common platforms such as Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant and even in-house developments. The second pillar is Beyto Research. The company conducts its own research there and also offers the market a community in which people can exchange ideas. The founders not only want to help shape change beyond the age of touch, but also learn from their community itself.
The Kinoheld.de Skill
The Kinoheld.de voicebot for Amazon Alexa has been available since mid-2020, allowing you to conveniently order your movie tickets by voice command and get more information. Kinoheld was originally a web platform that connects various cinemas in Germany on one platform and enables users to buy their tickets online. At the beginning of 2020, Beyto was awarded the contract to implement a voicebot for Kinoheld. At the beginning, the customer experience was of course the top priority, with the team putting a lot of thought into how best to guide users through the process of ordering cinema tickets by voice.
And this is how it works: “Alexa open Kinoheld” and the voice app starts on Amazon Alexa. The user is then asked for their zip code so that Kinoheld can access the regional film offerings in the user’s place of residence. The location will then remain preset for future ticket orders. If the user already knows which movie they want to watch, they have the option of buying a ticket and having the playing time of the movie announced, for example. But the makers of the app have also made provisions for undecided users. Users can also have the voice app make suggestions about the hottest movies in their own city, reports Daniel Mittendorf. So that nothing stands in the way of the perfect evening at the movies, you can find out more details about the films, have the showtimes announced and, ideally, order a ticket at the end. Payment is child’s play with Amazon Pay. Anyone who has not yet authorized Alexa for purchases will be made aware of this and asked for their consent by voice. An extra confirmation on the smartphone or PC is not necessary.
Loge or parquet
A question that every moviegoer is probably familiar with from the box office. And what is the best way to solve the problem in a voice app, considering that there are hundreds of cinemas on the Kinoheld.de platform with very different screens? It’s simple: “We don’t do it at all, an AI does it for us,” says Claudius and laughs. The Beyto team has also put a lot of thought into this, always with a focus on the customer experience. Initially, the idea was to divide each individual movie theater into a kind of chessboard pattern in which customers could determine their seating positions by voice input, such as at the back left. However, the team had doubts about the visual tangibility of this approach for the customer.
The solution lay in the frequency distribution of moviegoers’ seating preferences. 80 to 90 percent of moviegoers prefer to sit in the middle back of the cinema due to the good view and the particularly good sound experience. Based on this knowledge, the AI automatically fills every movie theater with visitors.
Hasta La Vista, Baby
To spice up and liven up the customer experience when ordering movie tickets, the Beyto team has come up with something special. In coordination rounds with Kinoheld.de regarding how to address customers and through surveys of friends and acquaintances of the Beyto family, it was decided to include sounds as part of the ordering process to further increase the desire to go to the cinema. And so, while ordering, users hear the unmistakable sound of someone eating their popcorn, sipping their Coke, the projector starting up or Arnold Schwarzenegger’s famous Hasta La Vista, Baby.
5 out of 5 stars
Launched at the end of August, the Voicebot has 5 out of 5 stars in the Amazon rating so far. So far, the feedback from users has been consistently positive, Claudius and Daniel are pleased to report. With just a few sentences and within two minutes, users can “chat” their way through the bot and easily organize an evening cinema visit from the car on the way home from work without having to queue at the box office. Something like that simply goes down well, the two are sure.
Unfortunately, the two are not allowed to say anything about specific user numbers at Kinoheld, but they have already been able to gain experience with voicebots. At present, the two feel that voicebots are often still perceived as very revolutionary and not very widespread. Nevertheless, they have achieved a remarkable 15 million sessions a year with their own voicebots, which means that they already have a wide reach. Even if displays will continue to play an important role in the future, Beyto expects a shift towards a 360-degree mix of voice, text and multi-experience bots.
Do we really need voicebots?
Definitely, say Claudius and Daniel. “Anyone who has ever ordered tickets away from the box office will of course be familiar with the journey you go through, with logging in and visiting three or four subpages. Then at some point you get to the page where you select your seats, which sometimes only works half well,” Claudius explains. This is where voicebots are easier, faster and more convenient. A lazy day on the sofa, when you don’t even feel like looking at your smartphone, can also be a potential use case. The Beyto team firmly believes that voicebots will be the predominant human-machine interaction of the future. Provided the ordering process works smoothly, no one will want to buy their train ticket on their smartphone or rent their car on a PC, adds Daniel Mittendorf, as the process is simply more complicated.
Learnings
1. never lose sight of the customer experience, but think of the bot from the customer’s perspective and put yourself in their shoes.
2. use the possibilities that voicebots offer you in contrast to textbots and incorporate funny sounds into your use case, for example.
3. voicebots are by no means something completely new and not very widespread. They can already be used to reach many millions of sessions a year.
It’s best to listen to the podcast episode with Sophie Hundertmark, Claudius Herz and Daniel Mittendorf for yourself pure. Have fun!
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