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Havaianas, one of the most recognized Brazilian brands worldwide, offers customer service 24 hours, 7 days a week with a lot of personality. How? With a conversational bot that delivers more than just an after sales service, generating conversations and incredible results for the company. Iana is “half robot and half mermaid”, a very well planned construction that is already gaining space globally.
Being present in several countries, Havaianas was highlighted as Best case of Global Expansion at Aivo Awards. To learn more about his experience throughout 2020, Everton Alves, CRO at Aivo, spoke with Mariana Diniz, director of CX Solutions at Sitel, the partner responsible for managing Iana. These are the main points of the conversation.
Meet Iana, the bot half mermaid
The customization of Havaianas' intelligent virtual assistant seeks to create a more humanized customer experience, right? And how do you see this impact?
This is one of the main differentials of this work: the persona. I like to say that the persona brings an aura to the bot because that's exactly what it is. I am terrified of this automated experience in which it is very evident that one is talking to a robot! So we thought about what the Havaianas brand would look like and how it would speak if it were a person. Based on that, we created the persona and tone of voice for the bot and then we bring exactly that aura, this personality into the channel. The big difference is exactly that the person does not have the feeling that it is a robotic and totally standard experience.
With Iana, you can ask her if she is married, how old she is, and why her name is Iana. In short, you can learn more about her, interact. She has super fun answers, to really make the experience remarkable and bring the brand closer to the customer, which is our main focus. We want to be highly resolutive, of course, so there's nothing better than being able to solve the customer's problem quickly and effectively, but also providing a memorable experience.
What channels are you using for Havaianas’ case?
For Havaianas we have WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and web chat. I would say that, thinking about Brazil, WhatsApp is fundamental, it is a channel that is already part of the daily life of Brazilians. A few years ago, Messenger was the big ball of the day and in a little while another completely different channel will arrive that we don't even expect! Looking abroad, in international projects, I am working on a proposal that involves China and what is on the rise in that market is WeChat.
Tell us a little about this planning to grow globally and understand the particularities and specifications of each market.
The first thing is to get to know your audience well. Now, for example, we have projects in Germany, so we have people at Sitel who help us to try to dive and better understand the tone we are going to use, to understand a little better about the culture. Maybe for them they will not use so many emojis when implementing a project ... It is not just adapting the bot's tone of voice, but ours as well.
Speaking of technology, it’s essential to have a platform like we have that of Aivo, which is an exceptional conversational artificial intelligence solution, very mature and with a very high comprehension capacity. With that we can also act with more confidence beforehand, for example, we are negotiating with several countries, but I have the confidence to do that because I know I have a highly capable platform.
And I always seek to enchant customers and to understand the culture, of course. We presented a project for a company in England and created a special persona, made a demo, showed in the tool the capacity of NLP and NLU. Aivo's cognitive ability is very high and also very impressive.
What we have seen in large cases of the globalization market, is done exactly like this: a global structure, but respecting the regional.
Yes. They ask "but do you do the translation automatically, via a tool?" and I always say "no, I don't like that, it is possible to do it, but exactly because we want this cultural adaptation, we have to be careful with the language, the tone of voice, not just take a translation like Google Translate". So, we have this concern, as you said, a care to improve the regionalization of the project.
Related article: From your website to the world: training a bot in multiple languages
And using the Aivo platform makes this process a lot easier: it's a very intuitive platform, you don't need a developer. I have a content team that deals with the solution on a daily basis without needing technical support in everyday things. It is very fast, so we can make changes, even insert buttons that are a bit more complex, but that the content team can do and in a super fast way. And as I said, it has been in the market for many years and we see that it makes a lot of difference for conversational AI, it is a platform that is very mature. We have projects in Portuguese, Spanish, English, we are going to other languages as well. And seeing how everything is going smoothly, we have the conviction of knowing that we have the best.
What would be the next steps for Iana's strategy?
We are very focused on this global expansion and all the technologies that manage to improve the experience in this issue of agility, really bringing the resolution capacity, add a lot. For example, we are investing in deep learning for image analysis that we will add to the bot and it will make all the difference since it will be able to solve one of the main reasons for contacting customer service (exchange and return of products) without really depending to transfer to a human. So, I see that these technologies increase the effectiveness and agility of the bot. And as a trend, I am betting on a voice bot for next year!
Iana was promoted and will become a personal shopper too, understanding information about the person's style, where the person likes to go and everything and, based on that, indicate some products, such as glasses, slippers, clothes ... So she it will also help the consumer to choose the products there, taking part in the e-commerce strategy. This personalization part, for me, is essential, it is, as I already pointed out, the aura of projects.
Have you met our 2020 featured clients?
If you haven't already, you can check out the full list of featured clients at Aivo Awards and discover the story behind their conversational bots. Or, if you'd like to implement our technology in your customer service strategy, please don't hesitate to schedule a call with one of our representatives.
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