Sausalitos Chatbot

THE CUSTOMER

The Sausalitos Group, based in Munich, is one of the largest providers of Tex-Mex food in the catering sector. The 41 franchise shops are spread all over Germany, while the company is continuously expanding. In addition to cocktails as well as Mexican specialities at affordable prices, Sausalitos also offers an integrated shop with accessories and drinks, bookable cocktail courses and much more.

REQUIREMENTS

Sausalitos is aimed primarily at a younger, highly digitalised target group in the larger German cities. The community not only needs to be nurtured in the restaurants through positive experiences, but also entertained online and stay connected to the brand. In order to further strengthen brand loyalty digitally without spending a lot of resources on it at the same time, the company needed a Facebook chat bot. This chatbot should be able to answer the simplest questions and reservation requests in order to relieve the employees and at the same time expand the range of offers.

 valantic DXA Solution

Valantic DXA has already done successful work for Sausalitos with the popular Cocktail Creater and the complete website relaunch. For the implementation of the current requirement,  valantic DXA programmed a self-learning chatbot within Facebook thanks to AI and machine learning. The chatbot runs individually on each of the individual franchise Facebook pages and has an API to the online reservation tool Bookatable.

The bot must be able to react to certain greetings, recognise a reservation request, query all details, finally summarise the reservation and send this data to Bookatable. The bot also recognises if the request is not a reservation after all. In this case, it independently provides further suggestions for action.

In order to capture the target group as well as possible, many variables were used in the programming. Thus, various regional greetings are covered as well as a wide range of grammatical errors. Thanks to the machine learning function, the bot is constantly improving and recognises more and more different variables that were not initially specified.

The bot develops into a fully-fledged conversation partner, giving customers the impression that they are talking to an actual employee.  

CONCLUSION

The Facebook chatbot behaves like an additional employee who perfectly attends to the target group and guides them towards the eventual goal, restaurant bookings. The bot strengthens the brand loyalty of Sausalitos customers and creates free resources among employees. The programming ensures that the bot can also take over other communication areas in the future.