For Vkusville, we at Avtomakon have made several bots at once, both external, useful for buyers, and internal, available to employees and couriers. Under the cut - a story about the bots themselves, their capabilities and about moving the functions and capabilities of the buying bot to the application.
Why Telegram
Telegram is a messenger that a very large number of people have. And if for a while it was not very popular, then a large-scale campaign to block it (blocking attempts, yes) became an excellent means of raising interest and additional installations. Plus, what distinguishes Telegram from the same WhatsApp and Viber is the presence of a simple and understandable API and the ability to hook up many internal systems to the bot.
And even if from the user's side it looks like a familiar scenario, he simply writes a request to the chat and receives a response, from the bot's side such a request pulls an appeal to a whole heap of different systems.
Buyer bot
The bot was created as an assistant for the buyer, solving almost all of his problems and giving answers to the maximum number of questions. It was necessary to look at the catalog with a breakdown by product category - please. Getting information about a particular product also works. It is also possible to change your favorite product in a couple of clicks, so as not to do it in the queue.
Initially, when creating a bot, we tried to take into account the maximum number of users' wishes. But even after the launch, users actively used the opportunity for feedback and offered many new features for the bot, which we ourselves did not even think of. He helped link the Let's Be Friends loyalty card or replace it if necessary and receive information about personalized promotions and discounts. And then we added the function of compiling a shopping list, so as not to forget anything and come to a specific store (which could also be checked with the bot) and buy everything at once.
One of the starting points when creating a bot and choosing a platform for its development was the fact that we have many 1C developers in our team. So we decided that if they start to establish bundles of functions and APIs for data transfer, then it is the bot that will allow us to quickly make a finished product for users that works properly in one of the messengers already installed on the phone.
It may seem that in a situation with a bot there will be no problems - you just read the API help, do everything according to the instructions, Botfather will help you, but in reality there are difficulties. We had a number of problems with API blocking. Due to the complexity of the architecture, some packages were lost, the Telegram server was refused at the network level and repeated the request only after a while. As a result, we got a rather slow bot response, which annoyed buyers. Because a wildly slowing bot in the user's mind is not much different from the absence of a bot in principle.
Therefore, we sat down to monitor the operation of the channel, after which we found problems and solved them with the help of the provider.
The bot became an MVP, which helped to gain early followers and helped to identify those wishes of buyers that are important and useful to them. This is the stage where you don't have a great end product yet that you can happily deliver to users. He helped us a lot at the start, when we were simultaneously finalizing the mobile application - thanks to feedback from bot users, it became possible to add deliberately expected functions to the application.
The shopping bot is currently not being finalized. All new functions that we are preparing, including at the request of customers, will appear only in mobile applications ( AppStore / Play Market ). We developed them for VkusVilla to replace the bot.
The application is more convenient, at least in terms of the visual perception of the catalog. Here you can find a photo of goods, and a more convenient breakdown into categories, and everything related to the loyalty program, user profile, promotions and special offers - it is more convenient to reach all this in a couple of taps on the screen than by commands to the bot. The statistics we have collected indicate that the popularity of the bot is falling and more and more people are starting to use the mobile application.
Delivery bot
For the normal work of couriers. The system was supposed to quickly transmit information to the courier about where and what order should be delivered, receiving in response from the courier the status of the task at each stage.
As we wrote above, with the help of a team (1C developer, SQL developer and analyst), everything about everything took 5 days. First, we discussed and fixed the necessary functionality, then, in fact, we wrote a bot, implemented the SQL procedures necessary for its normal operation and deployed all the databases. These are the first three days. They decided to devote the fourth day entirely to active testing, and on the fifth day they launched the bot in working mode.
In total, it turned out that the courier bot was made by a team of three people in 5 days. Support and some improvements in which case it takes no more than an hour of work per day.
The quick launch of the courier bot helped to scale up delivery capabilities on time, which during the period of self-isolation received a strong test of strength. However, like all other deliveries of anything. Plus, the implementation of the mechanism for the courier to work in the form of a bot removed the restrictions on devices: we previously had a small mobile application for couriers, but we wrote it only for Android, believing that this OS will be much more popular among couriers than Apple.
Reality has made its own adjustments: many couriers have iPhones. Therefore - a bot that works equally well on both axes. And it also removes the headache in terms of releases and their compatibility: the bot just gets new functions, everything just worked and works, without the need to frequently update something or check the version of the application. Because when the delivery application starts to get stupid for any couriers, this almost always translates into a decrease in customer loyalty (this is not his problem, that the courier has something not working correctly or has not loaded, he is waiting for his order at the right time).
Some things were run in on the go. For example, it was hypothesized that delivery in general would work better if the bot prevented the courier from responding to new orders if he had not yet finished delivering the ones he had on hand. It seems to sound logical - deliver what you have now, and only then go for new ones.
But such a condition became a serious obstacle in cases where the courier needs to deliver orders not within the city, but at dachas, villages and SNT: then the situation was preferable when the courier collected orders for a couple of hours for a particular village, 30 pieces, and then already went to the village to deliver all the orders at once.
Everything works quite simply:
- The courier checks in with the bot that he is ready to go.
- Receives a notification from the bot that a new order has appeared that needs to be delivered.
- He sees orders that are free for delivery on the map, estimates which are the most convenient and fastest delivery now.
- Gets the opportunity to build a route in the navigator for a trip, and can also contact the buyer by phone number.
- When he delivers an order to a customer (or returns to the store for some reason), he unsubscribes to the chat bot. The bot changes the order status.
Works and is actively being improved. As you can see, the situation is reversed here: in the case of buyers, we left the bot in the direction of a full-fledged and functional mobile application for two platforms.
In the case of couriers, on the contrary, from the existing application towards the bot for the messenger. So far Vkusville has about 2300 couriers (active users of the bot).
Other internal bots
In addition to these two key areas (consumer and courier), we decided to implement others in the form of bots. We have a hotline bot, which receives requests from users, where they are then analyzed by employees.
There is a technical bot for employees, which makes it possible to quickly send news on topics that a person is subscribed to (from personnel issues and payroll to promotional events), as well as alerts on the operation of a particular system. It also contains a calendar of events and distribution of tasks for store technologists. catching alerts from the monitoring of various systems and notifying those responsible in time.
We also made a book bot - Vkusville employees have a book club, and using the bot, you can leave a review on a particular book and recommend it to colleagues.
They all work and continue to be refined. So, it turns out that with the help of a single messenger and useful bots for it, you can solve a bunch of different issues, both external and internal. No additional applications, vendor platforms or anything else.
If you have any questions, feedback or suggestions about the work of our bots or applications, we will be happy to answer your comments.