A Chatbot Has Stolen My Job!
It’s actually pretty awesome.
It’s actually pretty awesome.
In 2020, I outsourced the 3D printing part of my primary niche business, and I had to give up half my gross income for the sake of someone else’s print lab taking over my production.
I was still answering a bunch of questions and interacting with customers, and I had just started seeing a woman who was an avid hiker and loved the outdoors as much as I did.
We weren’t yet seeing each other much, but I knew what I wanted to do.
It was a perfect opportunity to build a chatbot that I had been planning to build, so I could get outdoors more and do so for an extended period.
The parks were shutdown and we didn’t care, we were going anyway.
We pick up trash along the way, and practice Leave No Trace, so there was zero guilt about it.
Problem….. I still had to run the customer support part of my business, which was mostly repetitive pre-sales questions and training customers on how-to.
I had been watching youtube videos about people building chatbots, and I felt like this was something I was willing to try here. I knew I was going to make the bot fun and engaging, so that my customer base would be less resistant to interacting with it.
I found Botstar, and built my first bot with it.
At first it was pretty basic, like most chatbots you’ve seen.
It would ask if they were ready to buy, send them to links if they were, and it would pass most questions to me by taking their contact info and storing it as a lead, and sending me their message.
I had it tell a joke or two.
Pretty quickly, I decided to get cray cray with it.
I was done in time for summer, and I had a bot made to answer every possible product question I could think of, give advanced product tutorials, and more.
This is my final bot, Aficionado. Just look at this monster:
I built modules for everything I could think of.
Customer Support, Shipping, Returns and Exchanges, Affiliated product suggestions, Advanced Tutorials that answer every one of the most common questions I get from customers. Each module you see, leads to modules within modules. There are over 2,000 dialogue bubbles. All written by me.
I made the most comprehensive bot I think I have ever personally seen that isn’t an enterprise built bot.
When I was done, it did accomplish what I wanted.
I only had to work about 2–4 hours per week now.
I was bringing in about 40k. (80k gross that year in 2020, with 40k going to my print partner).
So many people have said to me : wouldn’t you rather be keeping your full gross? You were making six figures at one point, why stop?
Heck no. I did this for a reason. Think about it.
Full time job making about 100k/year gross
Or ……2 hour per week job making 40k?
No brainer for me.
Now I have free time to build other income streams.
How did my customers respond?
Some of the older customers just wanted my phone number, and that was fine. Bigger production customers especially.
But eventually, after the first year…. 90% of all interactions were happening with my bot.
Most of the repetitive questions were off my plate.
And I was only getting a handful of people who insisted on being passed to a human.
How did I do it?
I made my bot fun to interact with!
I made it to be a “Stoner bot”, because my primary website is a cannabis related product niche.
Note the red eyes. 😉
My bot throws memes at my customers during convo, every response has anywhere from 3–6 alternately worded responses to feed back to the user.
My customers know they can still get me, and if they ask, it will pass them to me, but not without giving them a hard time (in a fun way).
My inspiration for it’s personality was the character “Bender” on Futurama.
Partly because it just works… and also because Bender smokes stogies, and I immediately thought of him when envisioning a chatbot named Aficionado who is an expert on cigar molds.
Aficionado is still running today, and you can interact with it here:
So, how does a chatbot handle returns and exchanges?
Simple.
I just have it take their order info, order number, and then it replies with a return address, and tells them refund will be initiated when the return is received.
It passes an email with that info to my store email.
When I receive the item, I initiate the refund manually. Only thing I have to do manually.
If they want an exchange, it takes in a list of the items they want via message, and walks them through the same return process more or less.
An operation module triggers a new order which shows up in my 3D printing partners Shipping software.
The replacement is made and shipped.
All in all, I’ve only had to intervene on returns / exchanges about 3 times in the two years.
The convo flow goes something like this :
Refinement + Obsolescence
I refined this bot for about 1 year after I made it, editing and changing things when I would see breaks or dead ends with customer interaction.
I was able to monitor all of that in the conversation message windows where the bot hands customers to me if they ask.
It has been running since the spring of 2020 for me.
If something happened where a customer reached a dead end or a broken loop, I’d go in and fix it.
If they asked questions I had forgotten to include answers to, I would add those answers to the bot.
Then came ChatGPT, and within a week, everything I had spent so much time building became somewhat redundant.
Almost.
GPT bots are *almost* there, but not quite.
When future versions of GPT come out, they will be even better, and probably will end up replacing Aficionado.
GPT 4 is already miles ahead of GPT 3.5.
For right now, I keep Aficionado running because it controls the convo and steers it where I want.
Sometimes GPT goes off on a tangent.
This is mostly related to the names of two mold shapes that I sell.
Cannon Barrels, and Torpedos.
Every now and then GPT goes off script and references literal Torpedos and Cannons. (That was mostly GPT 3, GPT 4 has not done this so far….)
I am using a GPT powered bot on other stores I am building/testing, where I am not as worried about the complex esoteric questions that I get with Cannagar Tools.
Like Print on Demand stores. (see : Motherfunker Ebay)
I have also made a few youtube videos showing me training the GPT powered bots, if you are interested!
Thank you for reading!
Until next time….
Onward and Upward Everybody!
-Chris
Automated Income Lifesyle w/ Chris Morton YouTube
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