Startup interview: Henrik Fabrin, CEO, BotXO
RTIH discusses startup life with Henrik Fabrin, head honcho at Danish/Spanish AI chatbot venture, BotXO.
RTIH: Tell us about BotXO
HF: BotXO is a platform specialising in conversational AI, ML, and chatbots for e-commerce. The company was founded in 2017 in Copenhagen, Denmark, and quickly expanded to Madrid, Spain.
Our team consists of 28 employees of different nationalities. Our technology enables e-commerce companies to engage with customers, enhance the online shopping experience, and boost sales.
Companies of all sizes use BotXO’s Bot Builder across 15 countries in the EU and the US in consumer electronics, supermarkets and groceries, fashion, insurances, transport, travel, shipping services, gaming, and entertainment. BotXO NLU has an extensive database of 30.000+ premade e-commerce sentences.
We have just launched our new Conversational Commerce offering. This is a completely new concept that provides users with a fully integrated and frictionless e-commerce experience.
It is based on a bot interacting with a website. This technology enables companies to create a digital twin of their best salesperson, to communicate with customers while shopping online.
The conversational AI makes it possible for e-commerce businesses to understand user intent and sentiment in the moment of browsing, give detailed product recommendations for both personal shopping and gifts, identify what products are missing based on user wishes, and capture first party consumer intent in a cookieless world.
RTIH: What was the inspiration behind setting the company up?
HF: We wanted to find a way for brands to communicate with their customers online. Our goal was to improve the communication between systems and humans and support businesses by reducing inefficiency, eliminating repetitive tasks to enhance employees' work lives, and supporting customers 24/7.
We then saw that businesses struggled to provide frictionless online customer experience due to the customers' different needs and expectations and the websites' inability to understand the user intent. Moreover, the customers were on their own through the entire online customer journey, responsible for figuring out how any given website works.
At the same time, we saw potential in AI technology's ability to understand what people say in their own words. We wanted to develop an AI chatbot technology that would master human language, recognise user intent, and enable businesses to give a hand to their online customers. Consequently, removing tons of friction in the online customer experience.
Our vision was to change the approach to online shopping and move from "it is up to the user to understand how an online shop works" to "it is up to the shop to understand what the user wants and adapt accordingly."
RTIH: What has been the industry reaction thus far?
HF: The AI chatbot technology is still new to many businesses, so there is a natural learning curve for companies in matching the technology with their use cases.
We can compare it to companies that launched their first ever websites. After launching, they rapidly grew and saw the value and endless opportunities of having an e-commerce website.
It’s the same with chatbots now. The first movers launch their bots, learn about AI technology, and observe customer satisfaction and an increase in sales. They see that AI conversational chatbots enable them to reap the benefits and stay ahead of competitors. Just like those that launched their first websites years ago.
RTIH: What has been your biggest challenge/setback?
HF: The positivity bias. We thought that the market would move faster, but it did not. Optimism in business is a good thing, but you also need to be realistic about your business plans and market response.
The market looks different now. It is picking up very fast. To the extent, it is due to Covid-19 which has pushed e-commerce businesses searching for technology, allowing them to automate some tasks, give insight into what their customers need, and help them engage more with the customers.
RTIH: What are the biggest challenges facing the omnichannel retail sector right now?
HF: The biggest challenge for omnichannel retailers is creating a frictionless experience for every customer on every channel. The customers want to receive the best service regardless of the channel they choose.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, many customers switched to online channels, and creating a great user experience for them is incredibly important. Online customers ask for some guidance and advice as they often do in offline stores. Every customer has a unique profile and expectations. They also need a support at different moment of purchase process.
However, shopping on traditional e-commerce websites is impersonal, and there are limited ways for brands to interact with their customers to improve user engagement and customer satisfaction.
Fortunately, more and more online retailers try to overcome this challenge and implement some conversational elements to their websites. The innovative solution that can close the omnichannel gap and significantly improve user experience can be a conversational website powered by an AI chatbot and a more user-friendly interface based on dialog that helps with browsing, finding the right products, or filling in forms.
A conversational web design improves brand-to-customer communication, reduces the clicks required, and saves the user’s time. We can compare it to having a shopping assistant 24/7 but on the website.
RTIH: What's the best question about your company or the market asked of you recently by a) an investor and b) a customer?
HF: Before we received the recent investment of €4 million, we went through due diligence to determine whether the venture capital fund would invest in our company. One of the questions Seed Capital Denmark asked me was about our monthly subscription payment.
They were impressed that 50% of our customers are paying monthly and are not bound by long term contacts. This means we need to show the value of our technology and customer service every month. Monthly subscription gives confidence to customers when the tech and the market are still new.
The best question asked by a customer recently was about the meaning of our company name. BotXO is a symbol of the synergy between technology and humans. ¨Bot¨ stands for technology and ¨XO¨ for kisses and hugs. It is about our vision of technology enabling human communication and interaction. We believe that technology and humans work best when they work together.
RTIH: What can we expect to see from BotXO over the next 12 months?
HF: We are working on major improvements in the way our bots think. We aim to manage better different conversational contexts mixed with a state-of-the-art entity extraction and multi-intent detection logic used in our integrations to third party systems.
We are also focusing on keeping our simple and straightforward approach to the bot creation canvas, ensuring that better and more intelligent technology does not mean more complicated interfaces and longer configuration processes. We want to provide tools that will shape the experience with just a few clicks.
All the above are designed to fit perfectly with our Conversational Commerce solution, which will also grow in new capabilities and more accessible configuration tools for non-developers.
We want a bot to be a part of an e-commerce website, integrated so seamlessly that users will not distinguish between a bot and a website. Finally, another challenge we want to tackle is the cross-channel user journey. We are also working on an exciting area of using a conversational application to retarget web users.