How Massage Envy Uses Botco.ai to Enhance User Experience and Customer Experience: Case Study

Wellness brand, Massage Envy worked with Botco.ai to integrate a conversational chatbot into Facebook Messenger to help users find the closest franchise outlet, get pricing details, and schedule appointments. Here is how it has helped the brand improve its customer experience (CX) and user experience (UX).

In the age of content abundance and short attention span, it’s a challenge to capture your audience’s attention and keep them glued to your website or other digital avenues. The growth of conversational chatbots in recent years has managed to solve this problem by enabling users to get what they want without sifting through streams of information in a short period of time.

Users can simply type in queries or pick questions posed by the chatbot to get the information they need, which helps brands improve both – user experience (UX) and customer experience (CX).

And that’s what Botco.ai managed to do for Massage Envy. Massage Envy is a provider of therapeutic massages and skincare in the U.S. with around 1100 franchise outlets and over 1 million members. The unique problem with Massage Envy is that since each location has priced its services differently, the customers and members had to pick up the phone or visit the website to get the information and schedule appointments.

So, based on this information, Botco.ai identified the following challenges:

1. Identifying the ideal platform to set up the chatbot
2. Helping users find the nearby location, communicate the pricing details, and schedule an appointment
3. Answering free form/subjective questions

Let’s look at how Botco.ai helped Massage Envy improve their UX and CX by resolving these three key challenges:

1. Identifying the Ideal Platform for the Conversational Chatbot

Chatbots have been serving users through websites, mobile apps, and messenger platforms like Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp. For Massage Envy, the website was out of the question in the early stage of development, as introducing a change in user habits can go wrong if it doesn’t fit into their existing environment/usage habits. So, a better alternative was to go with messenger apps as these apps are “home” to their daily communication.

According to the 2018 F8 conferenceOpens a new window , Facebook hosted 300,000 chatbots serving over 1.3 billion users. So, it was a logical choice for Massage Envy to go with Facebook Messenger considering its popularity and userbase. Once they initiate the conversation via the Messenger bot, they can be routed to the website, depending on the nature of their query.

Learn More: Conversational AI: CX before ITOpens a new window

2. Helping Users with Basic Queries

After zeroing down on the platform, the next challenge was to deliver answers to the most fundamental queries, which were to help users find the nearest location, provide pricing details, and schedule an appointment. While chatbot is trained to help users with providing the service details and gathering customer requirements, prospects are redirected to the website to get the exact location and appointment details.

Rebecca Clyde,Opens a new window (co-founder and CEO of Botco.ai) exclusively shared the logic behind this by saying, “With any company we work with, our biggest challenge always seems to be narrowing down the focus. Organizations get excited and want to use our technology for different things, but we need to make sure the business establishes a primary goal to move the needle in a meaningful direction. For example, it’s typical to have an initial engagement with marketing wanting to use Botco.ai to qualify leads, while the service team might want it to handle post-sales support questions. While our technology can handle the requests of multiple departments, it’s much more effective to train on a few skills at a time, measure, and then expand further. We like to think about the business’ entire customer journey, tackle the most important thing, and then add capabilities from there.”

Learn More: How Conversational AI Is Empowering the Next Leap in Digital CommunicationOpens a new window

3. Answering Free Form Questions

If you have the basic queries laid out, it is a straightforward process to train the chatbot as you have to route them to different flows depending on the user’s response. The problem arises when the user asks a free form question. For instance, a word can have multiple meanings, so what meaning should the chatbot infer? This is where natural language processing (NLP) helps immensely. NLP takes into account the context to choose the appropriate meaning for the word and processes the query accordingly.

Clyde says, “We address free form questions by looking at patterns in the inquiries. Once we have a large volume of questions and corresponding answers, we can reasonably predict what customers are going to ask, regardless of whether it’s a free form question or not. We use an ontology-based by using the NLP approach to analyze keywords for context.

For example, if a person using the Massage Envy chatbot uses the word “book,” our bot knows the user doesn’t want to read something – they want to schedule an appointment instead. Using NLP also helps us identify Q&A workflows. Through this process, we know that if a customer asks question A, they’re likely to ask question B next. In the case of Massage Envy, question A is typically a question about the location’s hours, and question B usually pertains to a service request.”

Learn More: Move over chatbots, Conversational AI is hereOpens a new window

Closing Thoughts

Massage Envy has managed to automate a significant chunk of its manual work that was tedious for both – the company and its members by introducing a conversational marketing platform in its workflow. Marketing and sales can radically improve the overall CX by integrating conversational AI into their respective processes. Clyde opines, “Marketing and sales need to think about how all the content they produce can be accessible through a conversational interface.

“A useful thought exercise would be this: if your website disappeared, and you could only communicate with your customers via chat or voice assistance, what would that experience look like?

“One helpful approach to make content more accessible through chat and voice interfaces is to organize content in knowledge graphs. A knowledge graph is essentially a lookup table that sits behind the scenes and organizes your content, the knowledge within that content, and product information in such a way that it’s consumable to conversational interfaces.”

How do you think conversational AI can further help brands improve UX and CX? Tell us in the comments below.