All4Customer Meetingsis a one-to-one trade show designed to bring together professionals in customer experience, artificial intelligence, digital marketing, e-commerce and data. Join us on September 18 and 19, 2024 at the Palais des Festivals in Cannes.

This event will welcome digital marketing, e-commerce, customer relations directors and many others, who will come to meet suppliers responding precisely to their investment projects and exchange with their counterparts.

On the program:

• High-end meetings
• Pre-organized, targeted and ultra-qualified business meetings and lunches between top decision-makers and exhibitors
• High-level plenary conferences
• Welcome dinner
• A free evening
• Gala dinner
• Two days of benchmarking, matchmaking and networking

Come and meet us!

Meet our sales teams at stand G31 to find out more about our intelligent conversational agents: the callbot and chatbot. Our solutions are based on natural language understanding, artificial intelligence and generative AI to lighten the day-to-day workload of support teams, while improving user satisfaction.

We’d be delighted to discuss your projects and support you in your strategy.

We look forward to meeting you!

On 31^st March, we organised a morning of meetings and discussions around our clients’ challenges and needs. It was so good to see our partners and clients again after two long years! Thank you to everyone who attended.

The event, which focused on automated conversations, was the perfect opportunity to present our product developments and share our clients’ success stories and best practices in implementing and managing conversational robots. Our inspiring speakers included:

• Christian Sassady, Key Account Manager and Julien Loquin, Sales Assistant at Voxygen: Read the full article about Voxygen’s contribution to Dydu’s client event 
• Franck Gbenou, Head of Passenger Information and Customer Support at SNCF Connect
• Nelly Fercoq, BotSitter at PwC France

Our Chatbot, Callbot and Voicebot Developments

Dydu has been building chatbots for clients since 2009. Five years later, our team launched two new products: static and dynamic FAQs. The following year, we released a livechat solution. In 2018, we developed a key strategic product: a callbot, a conversational telephone robot. We’ve also been offering voicebots since 2020.

Our Product and IT teams work hard to enable our clients to easily create and manage bots that provide users with a seamless and relevant conversational experience. We aim to help them answer as many questions as possible in the least amount of time. Our recent solution developments include:

Expert Chatbots: Benefit from Ready-To-Use Knowledge Bases

Dydu has developed expert chatbots dedicated to specific sectors or topics, such as our HR chatbot, e-commerce chatbot and council chatbot. These bots draw on a pre-trained knowledge base and pre-written, but fully customisable, answers to address key issues within their scopes. The aim is to save as much time as possible during the early project stages.

Metabot: Call on Several Chatbots at the Same Time

Companies often have several chatbots specialising in different domains, such as an IT, HR and legal bot. Dydu deployed a Metabot so that end-users can call on each one via a single chatbox. The Metabot identifies the best answer for the user from all the knowledge bases. This greatly improves the user experience without interfering with bot knowledge managers’ working methods.

Dydubox: Customise Your Chatbox 

Dydu created the dydubox, a chatbot configuration interface, which enables bot managers to choose and modify their bot’s textual (name, disclaimer, GDPR, etc.) and graphic elements (font, colours, avatar, etc.), as well as its front-end features.

Teams Connector: Easily Deploy Your Chatbot on the Teams App

The Teams collaborative communication app is a completely independent channel from the dydu chatbox. Our teams developed a Teams connector to ensure that most of dydu’s features would function correctly. End-users can chat with the bot as they would with a colleague, while benefitting from our many features: decision trees, answer formatting (bullet points, rich content, links, etc.), alternative answers, redirection to other knowledge articles, etc.

Channel Menu : Integrate your chatbot on Your Communication Channels in a Few Clicks

Dydu developed a Channel Menu to make clients as independent as possible. This feature enables clients to deploy their own chatbot on the platform(s) of their choice. The web channel and instant messengers, such as Teams, are currently available.

Client Success Stories : SNCF Connect and PwC France Testimonials

SNCF Connect and improving the SNCF customer experience

SNCF built a chatbot with the dydu solution almost 10 years ago. The bot is available in eight languages and was originally deployed as a helpbox on SNCF Connect’s website and mobile app. It specialises in customer support issues, such as ticket exchanges and refunds or railcards and discounts. In 2021, the chatbot handled more than 10 million questions!

SNCF Connect then deployed its own bot in 2017, called “Oui Bot”, to answer user queries about buying and booking tickets. When the OUI SNCF site was migrated to SNCF Connect, they decided to merge the two bots. 

“We wanted an easily identifiable assistant, everywhere, all the time. We also wanted to provide customers with a single bot, rather than a split between the OUI Bot (SNCF bot) and Helpbox (Dydu bot),” Franck Gbenou, Head of Passenger Information and Customer Support at SNCF Connect, commented. The aim was to improve the customer experience, without losing everything that had been put in place with dydu.

“The technical challenge was to make the two technologies communicate. […] Our internal bot routes the requests. If it identifies a customer support query, or an unknown issue, it calls on the dydu API. This is how we built our bot mechanics,” Franck Gbenou explained.

SNCF Connect was able to interface these technologies in a seamless and intelligent way. The Oui Bot, dydu helpbox and escalation to a human advisor are now all included in a single chatbox! This strategy has proved to be a success as the number of requests has increased fivefold, with an improved and more integrated customer journey.

PWC France and the Digitalisation of Internal Support

PwC France called on dydu in 2019 to create Alex, a “concierge” chatbot for its 6,000 employees. The bot currently boasts 2,800 knowledge articles, covering a dozen subject areas (HR, helpdesk, offices, corporate strategy, etc.). It receives 15,000 questions per month on average and has an impressive 97% comprehension rate! The chatbot has become a strategic tool for PwC in managing internal support. It simplifies employees’ everyday working life and helps onboard new recruits.

The tool’s managing team regularly promotes the bot. They also continually improve and update its knowledge base. “We read the conversations every day. This enables us to identify sentences that haven’t been understood correctly or any little bugs, so that we can correct them and continuously improve the bot. We update our answers and knowledge articles according to current events. Anything that is no longer relevant is deleted,” Nelly Fercoq, PwC France BotSitter, explained.

PwC is planning on interconnecting its bot with its HRIS to carry out more transactional tasks, such as checking leave balance or requesting days off. PwC also wants to deploy its chatbot on more internal channels, such as Teams. 

Read PwC’s complete testimonial.

A big thank you to all our speakers and participants. We hope to see you again soon !

Internal communication has never been so important. The current economic and social context, as well as widespread remote working, has created new challenges for companies, as they strive to maintain a link among employees, between managers and employees and between the organisation and employees.

Good internal communication serves a number of purposes, that all directly impact a company’s performance. Whether to promote engagement, motivate employees or maintain corporate culture with shared values, internal communication plays a key role in building employee loyalty and attracting new talent. In other words, it helps consolidate employer value proposition.

Today, many organisations are matrix-based and change frequently. A lot of content is generated by different parts of a company. Meanwhile, the current health crisis has created distance and managers have been forced to break down silos and favour a cross-functional approach, while remaining close to their operational teams.

There is a wide range of internal communication tools available, whether physical or digital. However, they should all respect be accessible, consistent/transparent, and participatory.

Read on to find out how internal chatbots are particularly effective in these 3 areas.

Accessible by nature

Chatbots can be accessed from any device – PC, laptop, tablet or mobile phone -, and via multiple channels – intranet web pages, apps, instant messaging, etc.

They can also be accessed anytime: chatbots are available 24/7.

Users can chat in their own language and conversational style. Bots don’t care about imperfections: spelling mistakes, abbreviations, a to-the-point or literary style, etc. They require very little user effort and meet digital accessibility standards (RGAA in France) for people with disabilities and can be vocal (voicebots). Their NLP, or natural language recognition engine, means that technology adapts to humans, and not the other way round.

Transparent and consistent

Chatbots provide answers for everyone, no matter their role, status, seniority or ranking within an organisation. They display the same eagerness for everyone – immediate answers!

And the same level of service: the same tone according to the personality you chose for your bot (formal or familiar, friendly or direct, serious or funny, via the pre-defined social base), the same answer and the same level of detail.

Participatory

Although chatbots are automated, they exchange with the user, unlike an intranet where users have to do their own research, or a newsletter. In fact, the questions asked by employees reveal their needs and concerns. Continually adapting the bot according to user questions is a great way to stay connected to employees.

Chatbots are also good for passing on information (via the welcome messages or main questions – Top 3 -), and they can continually adapt to current events or situations: announcing an annual convention, informing about a major development, reminding employees about an event, etc. Chatbots are particularly flexible tools, that can instantly relay company news. This flexibility is particularly useful during difficult periods. In fact, 83% of HR decision-makers and chatbot users reported that they were “even more useful during a crisis” (Chatbot Observatory – April 2020).

Support for managers

Companies are increasingly reliant on managers to pass on all kinds of information to their teams. But this can often add to their workload, in addition to their operational objectives, during rapidly changing times. Chatbots can support managers by answering recurring questions and communicating on any changes that may affect individuals or the organisation as a whole.

In comparison to traditional tools, chatbots are permanent, transparent, and supportive. They can become a key part of your internal communication strategy. You can make sure that it is relevant and adopted by employees, by involving a representative sample in its implementation.

dydu attended the Chatbot Summit on the 25th and 26th of June 2019 in Tel Aviv. On the agenda, two days of conferences, demos and presentations dedicated to automated conversations, whether digital – chatbots – or vocal – voicebots. This fifth edition lived up to all its promises once more, through its attendance, teachings, and the rich exchanges between participants. The dydu team identified 5 main trends for the coming years. Let’s take a look back at this event, which each year positions itself a little more as a reference within the industry.

Full-automation

Although all the participants agree that everything cannot be automated, there are certain very specific and well-defined use cases that lend themselves to full automation. Take Lemonade for example, a new-generation insurance company that has fully automated its subscription process; 100% of its policy holders subscribed to their insurance via the chatbot (Rasa technology). The process is completed with just a few clicks, and the user is immediately covered! Better still, the Lemonade bot can also handle its policy holders’ claims; in 2018, the chatbot automatically handled 30% of reported claims, without any human intervention, and paid out $1M to the said policy holders! This is clearly a level 3 bot; contextualised and transactional.

So, how do you choose the right use cases to automate? The best use cases are those that can be handled without human intervention. Start small, with 2 to 5 simple and well-defined use cases. Build your use cases by starting with simple questions such as: what are the main reasons your users contact you? What is the main irritant for your employees? What do people like to talk about?

Contextualised and transactional bots

Dynamic FAQs are no longer sufficient; users are demanding personalised answers, to be dealt with according to their specific situation, and they want to be able to complete transactions via the bot (orders, payments, saving an appointment to their diary, automatic reminders, etc.). As demonstrated by the Lemonade case above, this is the kind of interaction users expect; simple, natural, personalised and automated, both orally and in writing.

The technology has reached a sufficient stage of maturity to offer this kind of experience. Of course, implementing such a bot is more complex, as it often needs to be connected to a third party information system or additional applications in order to retrieve the user’s specific information and trigger the requested actions. But this is the price to pay for an experience the user will appreciate, and to ensure that the user, satisfied, returns to the bot.

Open-source bots

Open-source technology is on the rise, and bots are no exception; more and more companies are getting involved. This approach has two main objectives; to reduce costs, and to not “get locked in” with one publisher and proprietary technology. In return, the company must have the necessary resources to implement, develop and maintain the built solution over time. This approach is therefore reserved for large groups who have made dialogue a strategic area in their development.

At dydu, we have another solution to avoid this “lock-in” effect with one publisher and technology; the Alliance for Open Chatbot. An initiative presented by our CMO, and treasurer of the Alliance, Thomas Dufermont, at the Chatbot Summit. The Alliance’s objective is to standardise chatbot communication interfaces so that they can dialogue with each other, right from their launch. As such, a company can work with several chatbot publishers, providing that they are all members of the Alliance, and ensure that all their bots can communicate easily with one another. The Alliance’s second objective is to develop an open-source single point of entry, which is precisely the purpose of trend n°4.

Meta bots

Over the past few years, companies have implemented bots left, right and centre; one for sales, another for after-sales service, a third to generate leads… This makes it difficult for the user to know which bot they should refer to when looking for a specific piece of information. It is therefore essential for the company to display one point of entry for the user, whatever the subject to be discussed. This was one of the main trends at the Chatbot Summit, and also presented by the Alliance during its presentation on stage.

In addition to enabling different technology bots to communicate, the Alliance’s second objective is to develop an open source meta bot, that companies can then take over and use as a single entry point for their users. The meta bot orchestrates all the different bots in order to retrieve the most relevant information for the user, according to their request.

Microservices

The last major trend of this summit was microservices. AI applications have developed considerably over the past few years; Natural Language Processing, Natural Language Classifying, Language Translation, Language Detection, Sentiment Analysis, Entity Extraction, Personality Insight, Tone Analyzer, Text to Speech and Speech to Text, Message Resonance, Text Extraction, etc. It is impossible for the same publisher to master all these components and technologies. Publishers are also refocusing on their core business and developing services in the form of microservices, which can be deployed and nested on demand. A little like Lego, the client companies assemble these microservices depending on the cases they wish to address and the problems they wish to solve.

And to finish… a few figures

Finally, some key figures gleaned at random from the conferences:

• 1 billion dollars for the bot market in 2024 (Transparency Market Research)
• 70% of users who have a bad experience with a bot will never go back, hence the importance of making a good impression from the very first exchanges
• 73% drop out within 10 minutes if they do not find their answer
• 100k bots created in one year on Messenger (whereas “only” 50k apps were put online on the AppStore in the first year following its launch)

And for voice technology:

• 70M homes will have a vocal assistant by 2020
• 70% of users are uncomfortable with voice search in public
• 82% of interfaces in 2020 will be based on speech recognition

Any questions or comments? Don’t hesitate to get in touch via our contact form, available here.

venture capitalists and other investors will join us in a purpose-built environment in Paris.

The goal: to provide a real-time platform for collaboration and a high-level stage for discussions around the impact technology has on both businesses and society.

Do You Dream Up has been selected by Webhelp in order to be in its Customer Experience lab. We will be presenting ourchatbot expertise.

We will also participate to challenge #91 “March of bots”, July 1st at 14:29, dedicated to conversational agents and artificial intelligence and how they are transforming customer service.

Let’s meet on our booth WHE_035 in the Webhelp Lab.

Useful information:

Place : Parc des expositions Paris Porte de Versailles, France
Date : June 30th to July 2nd 2016
Event website : Viva Technology Paris

More information: www.strategieclients.com

See the event summary (In French only)

Agenda :
9h00 Breakfast

9h30 Users Club launch :

• Voyages-sncf.com testimonial : the helpbox, new web et mobile contextualised help from Voyages-sncf.com (1st French travel agency)
• Caisse des Dépôts testimonial about the implementation of automatic chat
• Product new features (new BO interface, statistics evolution, mobility and Android, chinese support…)
• 2016 roadmap priorities