Using a chatbot to organically interact with eCommerce b2b clients for onboarding.

How might we use a chatbot to organically communicate with eCommerce b2b clients while maintaining the roots of our small, hands-on business approach? For this project my role was research, copywriting, visual design, and prototyping and I dabbled in NLP writing.

What Rothera Cycling Does

🚀

eCommerce

We make custom and limited edition cycling apparel, specializing in hats. Generates an average 200 orders per month, representing 60% of annual revenue.

🧵

Bespoke apparel

Producing custom branded hats for cycling teams, b2b sales, and OEM production. Generates an average 300 orders per month, representing 40% of annual revenue.

🎟️

Event activations

Organizing custom products, demonstrations, and rides for events in the corporate and cycling world.

Problem Research Sketching Solution What's Next

PROBLEM

Converting new b2b sales is a necessary but time-consuming task for Rothera Cycling.

How can we continue to grow and make the most of our time, while still maintaining the levels of attention our customer is acquainted to? Rothera Cycling custom orders have variances such as design, fabric type, quantity, and delivery window, but also variances in clients from the graphic design team at Google to the group of retirees planning their annual European ride, all of which require a degree of human interaction for onboarding. Guiding clients through this process is important as far as generating new business and also finding the best execution for each client’s needs, however, it can be very time consuming for a small business with only so many matches to burn each day.

🧢

Scaling authentically

Initial onboarding is too slow and as a result has a high churn rate. How can we speed it up?

🧢️

Learning curve

Onboarding must cater to a variety of technical backgrounds.

🧢️

Scaling authentically

Clients value the highest level of hands-on attention. How might we maintain our ‘bespoke’ foundations?

How might we modernize b2b conversions while maintaining our small business roots?

To give you an idea of our scale: We’re able to produce just over 1000 units in a given month, which represents about 30 individual orders each requiring an average of 12 email exchanges before conversion. We love to be there for our clients as much as possible, and some of our favorite designs have come from our most hands-on clients, but at the end of the day, we need all the time we can get. All of which is a long way of saying: we’re a small business that’s stretched thin, and we need all the help we can get.

1080

Units in a given month

12 emails

Exchanged on average before conversion

4-6 week

Turn around time per order

✅

Set the tone

Maintain conversational, on-brand tone.

✅

Answer all the questions

Answers recurrent questions, such as variable cost and turnaround to speed up onboarding and increase sales.

✅️

Extract designs

Enable users to download our template and upload their design or logos directly to our chatbot.

✅

ELI5

User friendly interface for all ranges of client.

RESEARCH

Now we know where we’ve started and where we want to go, so let’s figure out the best way to get there.

I started by looking at our competition to see what their approach was to the problem of onboarding b2b clients. Pace and Walz are our two main competitors and they not only lack a passive form but also force the user to take action by calling or emailing to place an order.

How might we Deliver a solution that maintains simplicity, but still heralds usefulness?

With years of user data at our fingertips, I had our dive into our previous email exchanges with b2b clients to identify the pain points of our more hands on clients. We already know that our main concerns at Rothera are $QUANTITY, $STYLE, and RUSH?, and through card sorting we’ve started to identify the common themes in our clients below.

Once we narrowed the scope, main concerns (below) on both sides of the equation that are most important before conversion can occur became clear thanks to this excercise.

💡 They love 1:1 attention, but our time doesn’t scale.

SKETCHING V1

First I tried to broadly compare two options. Option 1 (left) would be to either use our pre-existing, or a third-party extension checkout system to create a wholesale order user flow. The pros of this would be an integrated and easy checkout process and calendar management, the downside would be a lack of control over our calendar and also our clients which may lead to more work in the long run. Option 2 (right) I considered was to add a chatbot to help customers walk through their orders and extract all the necessary information for onboarding.

Creating an automated interaction seemed like the more appealing path to me, so I started to sketch out what I learned was important to the interaction and the broad strokes of information I would want to glean from the user.

ROTHERA CHAT BOT V1 FLOW

In order to understand most accurately the flow needed in order to collect enough information from our order I put together a user flow for onboarding our b2b clients.

Now that I know where we need to go, and the stops along the way we need our user to take, I moved the flow design to DialogFlow where I could start creating the interactions and copy we’ll be passing onto our chatbot.