BotSupply unleashes the power of conversations

"We started BotSupply in 2016 when the first chatbots began popping up on Slack, Skype and Facebook. And we instantly realised the considerable cost-saving potential they hold: every time a Danish bank receives a phone call or email it costs them upwards of 6 euros. If we could automate parts of that process, then we saw a huge potential upside."

"So from a technology perspective, it’s true that we are a chatbot company. But in essence, we provide a service, in the sense that a chatbot is not only technology - it is about creating an experience for the user. Chatbots are opening up a new interaction channel that allows organisations to interact with their end-users in a novel way. The core of our business, therefore, is designing pleasant conversations."

"Our chatbot platform is our primary business in BotSupply. We cover all the Scandinavian and European languages, Arabic, Portuguese and Chinese: In total, we have 27 different languages. And we’ve built our chatbot technology upon Oracle infrastructure, and therefore we are very connected to their ecosystem."

Turning bureaucracy into a conversational process

"As of now, I’d say that public organisations only account for 10 per cent of our business, but there is a lot of room for growth in the governmental technology space. For instance, we are already working with a Helsinki Hospital, and we are currently discussing a project with a Danish Government agency to help them with their airline reimbursement service. As of now, the entire process is manual. Customers fill out a form online, which is then converted into a ticket that a human agent needs to read and assign to the right department."

"Essentially, they want to translate the entire process into a conversational process, which would allow workers to spend less time on low-value task and consumers to get a faster answer. Processes like these are ubiquitous within the public sphere, which is why I see a significant growth potential for Govtech. One of the challenges that we’ve overcome here is that for enterprise corporations, the primary value proposition is cost savings. In contrast, the public sector cares more about delivering a better service to the citizen and improving productivity."

"In the Middle East, we see that governments and hospitals are much faster than public organisations here in Europe. So, I think that the amount of public organisations that we are going to work with is going to increase over time, and not just here in Scandinavia, but especially in the EMEA regions."

Leaving behind the red ocean

"When we started in 2016, we were one of the only chatbot companies in Denmark and Scandinavia. Today one of the significant challenges - which we’ve turned into an opportunity - is that we operate in a market with perhaps 600 to 800 chatbot companies globally. So our challenge was to carve out the right niche for ourselves."

"We’ve turned that challenge into our most significant strength today. We did that by building our chatbot system on an Oracle framework, we are the only chatbot company in the world, who has done that. That strategic decision allows us to leverage a lot of synergies with Oracle and Oracle partners and use it as a channel distribution. Also, we’ve been quite successful beyond the public organisations in Scandinavia we’ve worked with companies like Lundbeck, Carlsberg and Danske Spil."

Becoming more than a chatbot platform

"Because we operate within the Oracle ecosystem, we’re working with substantial enterprise entities with heaps of customer data. Our initial product was the chatbot management system - the platform - which has been a great starting point. But we’ve also realised that building the chatbot may not be the first step on the customer journey."

"To create the right type of conversation, you need a lot of data points. These enterprises have millions of historical interactions with the users via mail, forms, phone calls and so on. We turn all those data into insights, which we can use to decide where a chatbot can be meaningfully deployed in the process. So we are adding this new product that our customers can use to analyse data, get insights and then build the right chatbot for their needs."