Domains are a very specific product, usually marketed just via limited time offers and simple discount banners. A popular Slovak tech company WebSupport has asked us to do it differently and find a more engaging consumer communication channel for promoting .eu domains that could be offered for a discounted price. Also, just around that time the Facebook released public Messenger bot API so we've build our own custom stateful chatbot engine (since there were no usable services available at the time).
The engine powered the OverBot (meaning CheckBot in Sovak) that helped you register a domain via our client's service. We've dedicated a lot of time tweaking the engine code in a way that person wouldn't feel as if they were talking to a cold bot but to a buddy instead, parsing the natural language and keywords, giving the bot a friendly personality and implementing a lot of states that were meant to be just for fun. Bot also spoke to you by name, joked around, sent funny gifs, etc.
But the most fun was the core functionality of the bot. When you were about to register a domain the bot said that that if you buy that domain with a .eu suffix you could haggle the price with it. The bot haggled just as you would haggle with someone on a market; if the price was too low he laughed you off/raised his offer a little, if you played the cards right and you lowered your prices reasonably, you could get up to a 80% discount of the original domain price.
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20xhigher earned media than the investment
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12%increased sales in domain sales
Our bot has become the topic number one in the media. We event connected the bot to the media journal editors, having the bot chat with them a little and send them the press release about the campaign. The bot has reaffirmed WebSupport's position as a true innovative tech company that isn't afraid to be a tech pioneer.
