TARS Conversations

When we started creating content at TARS, four years ago, we used to publish posts on pretty much any topic that came to our mind. Our reasoning was that if we found something interesting, our customers surely would too.

We were wrong.

While our content did well with other tech geeks like us, it didn’t resonate with the average marketers and small-mid sized business owners who were our target customers. At the core of our problem was our language. In our content, we spoke about chatbots as if our readers already knew what they were, and unfortunately (for us) most of our target customers (the average marketers and business owners), had no idea what a chatbot was!

Since then, we’ve been able to avoid situations like this through a combination of trial-and-error and consumer insights from our sales team, but I’ve always wondered if there was a way to get these insights without burning fingers first, and this week I finally got an answer!

I spoke with Jerome Van der Linden, CEO at Bot Implementation Institute about how he and his team are helping large CPG businesses learn more about their customers using chatbots.

Traditionally if a business wanted to learn more about their customers’ preferences, they would have to carry out a market research study which usually consists of a combination of qualitative and quantitative research.

On the quantitative side, they usually conduct surveys, and the beauty of this method is that you can do a lot of them. Since they are self-administered, you can literally conduct thousands of them for relatively cheap. Unfortunately, surveys can only get you so far. Surveys tend to give you relatively surface-level data and often miss key insights that could be useful to your business.

This is where qualitative research comes into the picture. Before conducting surveys, businesses will usually conduct a set of in-depth interviews to get a deeper understanding of their customer’s psyche and use that understanding to frame their survey questions. The only problem with this approach though, is that interviews are time and labor-intensive. You need an actual human interviewer to spend 30-60 minutes talking to one person to get a single data point.

The end result is that the researcher conducting the study has to strike a delicate balance between quantity and quality.

What Jerome and his team are doing is they are bringing these two methods together by automating interviews through

By automating the interviewing process through chatbots, they are giving the researchers the ability to conduct in-depth 1-on-1 interviews at scale.

As someone who is a social scientist by training, I found the conversation super interesting, because essentially what Jerome and his team are doing is they are automating a data collection method that most researchers the ability to conduct in-depth one-on-one interviews at the survey scale.

While Jerome’s work primarily focuses on enterprise-level customers, his insights about customer engagement can be used by any business regardless of size.

If you want to improve your marketing effort by understanding your customers better, give the interview a listen

In this podcast, you will learn…

👉How chatbots improve consumer data quality
👉How chatbots can help businesses scale data collection
👉How chatbots provide a better UX for consumer surveys
👉How consumer insights can be operationalized to improve marketing efficiency

Links, links, and more links…

Jerome’s LinkedIn
Bot Implementation’s website
Bot Implementation’s podcast (I was the guest int heir latest ep)
Arnav’s Twitter
TARS’ Twitter

What does it take to run a successful SaaS startup?

Lots of funding? A high valuation? 

That's what most people think, but it doesn't necessarily have to be the case.

Since 2017, TARS has been part of the Upekkha Catalyst Accelerator, a startup accelerator at the forefront of the ValueSaaS movement, which aims to create capital-efficient SaaS startups that are not overly dependent on venture capital.

As the accelerator gears up for its next cohort (which you can apply for here), we spoke with Prasanna Krishnamoorthy, a partner at the accelerator about his thoughts on the State of SaaS.

Even if you aren't in the SaaS space, Prasanna shares some valuable frameworks that you can deploy in your business regardless of industry, so I highly recommend that you give it a listen.

What you'll learn

👉What is ValueSaaS

👉What is VanitySaaS (spoiler alert it's the opposite of ValueSaaS)

👉How you can understand your customer's needs better

👉A framework for you can approach crises like COVID-19

Important Resources

First and foremost here's the application for Upekkha's next cohort (I highly recommend that you apply)

Next, here's the Upekkha's ValueSaaS Basecamp Guide that Prasanna mentioned. A valuable resource if you want to learn more about ValueSaaS as a movement

Here's Prasanna explaining in more detail what the Hierarchy of Business Needs are: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-039j2NR1w

Also, check out Simon Wardley's thread about the Isolation Economy if you want to learn more about how COVID has changed the business landscape.

And of course, don't forget to follow us on social:

Prasanna's Twitter

Arnav’s Twitter

TARS’ Twitter

The most common complaint we hear when we ask people about their experience with chatbots is "they suck because they always make mistakes."  This is undoubtedly true. We've all interacted with at least one chatbot that has said "sorry I can't answer that question yet."

But what if I told you that these sorts of errors are actually a good thing!

A few weeks back I spoke with Shane Mac, SVP of Marketing and Partnerships at Conversocial, and Shane introduced me to the idea of using "errors as intelligence."

The basic logic goes something like this. Errors are basically your customers' way of telling you what services you should offer. Every time your chatbot fails to give them what they want, that's your bot telling you what you should include for the next customer.

Cool insight huh?

Well, if you want to learn more awesome chatbot design tips like that one, listen to our interview with Shane above.

In this podcast, you will learn…

👉How you can use your chatbot's mistakes to improve UX
👉What the future of voice assistants will look like
👉Apple's magical chatbot experience that no one is talking about
👉The fundamental difference between websites and chatbots
👉Why errors are a chatbot's superpower

Important Links

Shane's Twitter

Conversocial's website

Arnav’s Twitter

TARS’ Twitter

I've been in the chatbot game for almost 5 years now, and in that time, I've found that there is a single factor that differentiates the good chatbots from the not so good ones:

The intention of the chatbot's creator.

Now, I realize that this might sound like some holier than thou spiel about having the right intentions, but I'm being dead serious. A lot of people decide to build chatbots for their business for the sole reason that they see everyone else building chatbots and they don't want to feel left out. Inevitably these efforts result in a user experience that disappoints customers and businesses alike.

On the other hand, when people start out with a problem that they are trying to solve and then naturally arrive at chatbots as the solution, the results are better. Much better. Need proof? That's where this episode comes into the picture.

A couple of weeks back I spoke to someone who falls into the latter category of chatbot creators. Jared Jaskot is an immigration attorney and co-founder of YoTengoBot, a conversational tech startup that helps law firms answer common recurring questions from potential clients and book more high-quality consultations.

The startup was founded out of a problem that Jared was trying to solve at his workplace.

He found that a lot of his clients were waiting months on end for a 30-minute consultation in which they'd ask him the most basic questions so he set out to find a solution.

After a bunch of trial and error (read: forms and websites), he found chatbots and guess what? They worked. Chatbots helped him automate 70% of customer conversations, increase his conversion rate by 10x, and most importantly deliver his necessary legal services to more people.

Tune in to the episode for the full story👆

In this podcast, you will learn…

👉The art of asking for sensitive information in a chatbot

👉How chatbots improve the ROI on digital ad campaigns

👉Why even non-AI chatbots are better than websites and forms

👉 How chatbots help small businesses scale

👉How you can leverage your chatbot to build an audience?

Links, links, and more links…

Jared Jaskot’s LinkedIn (I’m putting this link first because Jared posts really insightful articles about legal chatbots on his page)

YoTengoBot's Website

Arnav’s Twitter

TARS’ Twitter

What do filmmaking and chatbot creation have in common with each other?

Quite a bit as it turns out!

A few weeks back I spoke with Jason Gilbert, Lead Conversational Designer at CoCoHub, and multiple Webby award winner about his thoughts on conversational design and if there is one thing that I learned from talking with him it was that if you want to make a chatbot that users actually enjoy, then you should go to film school.

On the surface, this might seem like a controversial statement to make because what could filmmakers possibly know about software creation.

But when you let it sit with you for a little bit it starts to make sense.

Chatbots are undoubtedly pieces of software, but their user experience is defined not by the efficiency of their underlying code, but rather by how engaging their messaging is. And if engaging messaging is what you are going for, would you rather have a filmmaker or an engineer working on your chatbot for you? Probably the filmmaker huh?

Now I know what you're thinking. "I don't have the time to go back to film school."

Well, that's where Jason comes into the picture. He is a filmmaker by training and in our conversation, he shared some valuable insights on how you can make your chatbots more engaging through creative conversational design.

In this podcast, you will learn...

• How to create a personality for your chatbot
• Why you should make your chatbots more fun (even if they are for customer service)
• How you can leverage your chatbot to build an audience?

Small business owners often struggle to engage their customers online and it causes their business to suffer.

This week, we spoke to Mike McGreevy at ZoomOut Group, about how he is using chatbots to help solve this problem.

Running a small business is not easy😅

You need to handle everything from sales to customer support to marketing all on your own, and unsurprisingly things can start to feel overwhelming pretty quickly🥵

Preston Martelly, and his agency Javalogix, are helping entrepreneurs ease this burden by taking digital marketing off their plate👍

We spoke to Preston about how he helps small businesses leverage chatbots🤖 (and traditional digital marketing techniques) to capture more leads and grow their businesses📈

This week, we spoke to Vivek Khandelwal from iZooto about how his team is helping marketers reduce their dependence on Big Tech through the power of owned audience marketing.

Healthcare is one of those basic services that every person will need at some point in their lives. Unfortunately, the actual process of receiving healthcare services is often fraught with bureaucracy and friction, which makes an already stressful situation (being sick) positively unbearable.

Fortunately for us, there are a handful of innovative companies working to fix this situation, and this week were lucky enough to speak with the founder of one of those companies.

Bildad St. Louis is the founder of RecoveryIP Innovation, a company that is working to revolutionize the way healthcare providers deliver services to their patients.

Recruitment is a notoriously bureaucratic process. Between the heaps of documents that recruiters need to collect to review an application, and the constant back and forth to schedule interviews, re-interviews and screening calls, companies have to invest an immense amount of time and effort into hiring new talent.

In this episode of Tars Conversations, we spoke to Martyn Redstone, a recruitment expert, about how he’s using chatbots to simplify some of these processes and help companies grow their teams more efficiently.