A lesson in dogfooding
This month we challenged ourselves to create a cool conversational experience for exhibitors and attendees at Enterprise Connect. The convention was held at the luxurious Gaylord Palms Resort, built on swampland near Orlando.
The premise was simple: We wanted to showcase the power of messaging to as many people as possible. What do most people love? Free stuff. Attendees would chat with a bot to receive free stuff at our (extremely beautiful, incredibly designed) booth. We called it The Chat Boutique.
Exhibitors, chained to their own booths, would be handed off to a real human who would coordinate the deliveries. We had runners (they were models!) on the floor zipping between booths, dropping off candy, drinks, and socks.
And the Real People the exhibitors chatted with? Three Smoochies, staffing a makeshift contact center in Montreal out of a meeting room named after a food emoji. 🍕
One of those Real People was Me.
Building the Chat Boutique
Here’s where things get technical. To showcase a host of different features, our designers built the experience using our embeddable Web Messenger. Users would initiate a conversation with a bot before being handed off to a person (hey!). We would chat them up, shoot the breeze, and send them a carousel when it was time to order.
Once they picked what they wanted, a conversation extension would have them fill out their name and booth number, giving them the option to connect their preferred messaging channel. That means they could carry on the conversation wherever they preferred, with all the context from previous exchanges.
What did we learn from using a product built on Smooch?
Messaging is a great way to have personalized conversations at scale, but we did not anticipate the scale we ended up working with.
It’s not easy being the person using help desk software. Dealing with high volumes of customers is overwhelming. Real CS agents might have an easier time doing this with training and experience, but we were making it up as we went along. I hate to admit it but we definitely lost some conversations in the shuffle.
But!!! Big but! It’s clear that people are excited to chat They’re so excited they kind of broke our system.
So we need to plan for the unexpected.
Exhibitor orders and information were routed into a Google Sheet, where another person dispatched the runners to the booths. We kept breaking it. What happens when somebody wants to order two bottles of water instead of one? What if they prefer sugar-free Red Bull? If we wrote customizations into the Sheet, it died. Conversely, orders were often accidentally duplicated, tripled, and sometimes quadrupled — ultimately manageable, but with limited products we wouldn’t want one person to end up with five copies of the 2019 State of Messaging report.
Always pack an extra pair of socks.
Corporate swag famously lacks the effortless charm of indie streetwear brands and DIY graphic tees, despite being made in the same factories. This is absolutely not the case for our socks. Smooch socks are an elegant, timeless choice that can easily transition from day to nightwear. It’s no surprise that our socks were the fastest going item. We ran out with more than half of the convention ahead of us, and nothing feels worse than telling somebody who wants free socks “no.”
You never know who’s on the other end of the conversation.
While looking up exhibitors on Twitter, I found that one of our conversations was with a former contestant on the Bachelorette!
Yes, he was on season 7 almost 10 years ago. Yes, he was eliminated with two other men with six weeks to go in the season. Yes, I asked him about it when he popped into my inbox.
He continued to use our service throughout the show. Each time he hit us up for water bottles and socks, the conversation history gave us the context we needed to personalize the conversation. Although we were operating on a small scale for a short time, Smooch’s capability of storing and maintaining conversation history across channels is great for contact center employees. Customers don’t have to repeat themselves, agents can customize their service, and they’ll never forget about your brief stint on the Bachelorette.
Contact center employees get ghosted too.
Dating apps have really changed the way we treat people. Ghosting, when one person abruptly breaks off the relationship with no warning and no contact, has emerged as a defining feature of our app-based dating culture. As it happens, many of our conversations would end abruptly too. After a volley of emojis, GIFs, and banter, we’d hear nothing. Were they okay? Did they get what they ordered? We had absolutely no way of knowing.
It’s best not to take it personally.
Help desk software is weird.
There are a number of features that could have made this a bit easier from the agent side. Typing indicators, read receipts, the ability to send outbound notifications — little reminders that the conversations were alive. New conversations would pop into the group inbox before being routed into our personal inboxes. It was easy to hoard incoming conversations, but difficult to tell when a conversation was truly finished.
While our Web Messenger and linked channels can support modern messaging experiences, agents using help desk software are limited as to what they can see. Live agents deserve better!
Dogfooding is a word people use unironically, and that’s okay.
I’ve heard the word “dogfooding” so many times this past week without knowing what it was. In my onboarding I was introduced to the expression “drinking our own champagne,” which I like more. I absolutely did not connect that to “dogfooding” until I googled it after the meeting.
