Passionate about chatbots, Jérémie GAMER created the startup Poolcare in order to help pool professionals in their daily customer relationship management.
What is your company and what is your role?
Poolcare is a Toulouse-based startup specialized in the design and development of a pool expert chatbot. Our chatbot helps pool professionals manage their customer relations.
With 10 years of experience in the pool industry, I founded Poolcare and oversee the development of the chatbot.
From my experience, my role revolves around two main axes: the coordination of the development of the chatbot and the reformulation of the technical constraints related to the pool sector.
What were your issues before launching your chatbot?
Being in a seasonal business, pool professionals find themselves overwhelmed when the summer arrives. As the productivity of these professionals is not extensible, they work every summer on a just-in-time basis in order to deal with recurrent customer requests: How do I treat the water in my pool? What is your intervention area? What are the opening hours of your store? Can you give me a quote for a particular product?
As this is a technical subject, the pool specialist is the best person to answer these questions. However, it is not always available, the queues can quickly become annoying and customer services are rarely open after 7pm. The Poolcare chatbot appeared as an obvious solution because it is able to respond to different identified situations:
- The user often needs advice on water treatment due to lack of knowledge or because of an oversight.
- He asks his questions without needing to know the technical terms related to the pool.
- The chatbot holds a real conversation, and adapts its answers according to the characteristics of each user’s pool.
- The user finds the same quality of advice.
Why did you choose the Botnation solution?
The Botnation chatbot creation platform was chosen for the quality of listening and responsiveness of the Botnation team. But also because the company offers an intuitive, robust and easily scalable solution.
What was the creative process?
Our chatbot is the result of a project that we carried out in co-creation with all our stakeholders (individuals, distributors, and pool technicians). We were thus able to define the usage scenarios and map the interactions with our computer system. The pool world being a technical field, the contextualization of key expressions was the most demanding phase.
Enriching natural language understanding is one of the strengths of our solution, with our centralized and globalized knowledge base. If the chatbot fails to understand the user’s request, a notification is immediately sent to answer the user’s question directly.
Have you been able to measure the first results?
Our chatbot aims to be useful to pool professionals, answering questions from their customers and prospects 24/7.
Our first results are very positive and confirm the usefulness of our chatbot for professionals with 55% of the requests received between 6:30 pm and 10:30 pm, and 25% received between 6:30 am and 9:30 am.
Would you have some advice for a company that also wants to launch a chatbot?
Defining the objectives that the chatbot must fulfill and understanding the needs of the end-users are essential to be able to re-formulate the objectives and expectations of the latter into a technical response.