FAQ Chatbot Helps Business Fly
This B2C manufacturing and ecommerce business deals with customers and suppliers from all over the world had to quickly increase production and assembly to meet new demand. Demand for their main product, a science kit, exploded overnight. On 18 March 2020 online subscription rates increased six-fold within 24 hours.
From their Worklab space in Wales, the team was dealing with increasing orders and volume queries from both customers and suppliers. Within a week of the lockdown announcement, they had become so inundated with new customers they had to suspend their online registration.
Approach
Our approach was to support the business to keep up with the volume of questions coming from several different communication channels and successfully capture demand from new customers. We helped them to deploy the GoSmarter Chatbot tool to deal with the most common questions asked by customers and take the pressure off the production and management team.
Objectives
This aim was to build a Microsoft Azure-hosted chatbot and deploy it to the company website and social media channels. With a little support, their bot was up and running in hours and responding to customer queries worldwide and 24/7.
Achievements
Their personalised bot christened LetterBOT became the newest member of their customer service team. It was able to guide new users through their product range and help them to choose the right subscription. It took the pressure off the team and was able to deal with volume questions.
Key results
- Deployed a Microsoft Azure-hosted FAQ Chatbot
- Used a Microsoft QnA Maker knowledgebase to keep the bot relevant and up-to-date
- Selected a pre-built personality and style to suit the brand
- Staff trained to maintain the knowledge base
Further information
FAQs
Why does chatbots work for manufacturing e-commerce businesses?
Letterbox Lab is a distinctive case study in manufacturing: a product business that also operates as a direct-to-consumer ecommerce company. The manufacturing challenge — scaling production to meet a six-fold increase in demand — is fundamentally different from the customer service challenge, but both demand fast, scalable solutions.
The chatbot addressed the customer service challenge precisely because it operates at machine speed. Where a human customer service agent handles one conversation at a time, LetterBOT handled hundreds simultaneously, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. For a business suddenly managing a global customer base from a Welsh worklab, that capability was the difference between controlled growth and being overwhelmed.
What is the Microsoft Azure QnA Maker approach?
The technology underpinning LetterBOT — Microsoft Azure’s QnA Maker — is a knowledge base platform that enables businesses to build question-and-answer systems from existing content. Letterbox Lab’s FAQ content, product documentation, and subscription information was fed into the knowledge base, enabling the bot to answer accurately from day one without needing to be trained from scratch.
The staff training element of the implementation — teaching Letterbox Lab’s team to maintain and update the knowledge base — was essential for long-term sustainability. As products change and new questions emerge, the team can update the bot without external support.
How did the pandemic response evolve into long-term business capability?
Like many of the businesses GoSmarter worked with during 2020, Letterbox Lab’s adoption of a chatbot was initially a crisis response. But the capability they built during that period became a permanent part of their customer service infrastructure — a 24/7 channel that continues to handle queries, guide new customers through the product range, and free the team to focus on the work that requires human judgement.
This pattern — crisis response becoming permanent capability — is consistent with the broader shift to digital adoption that the pandemic accelerated across manufacturing and e-commerce.
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