Draft #1

Introduction (quick who and why, about company, setup)

Part I (about problem, why they wanted test)

Part II (why yclients, experience, why failed)

Part III (Chatfuel introduction, building process)

Part IV (Flow details, template, results)

Introduction

Masha cares about skin just like everybody else. Like all of us she wants a healthy skin. She now works in a company that makes beauty products. It’s a Russian based company inexpensive, natural products. One of the biggest brands in Russia. Products are stylish and pretty even though it is affordable. Their Instagram is popular and they have many clients there. She got here like so. She has this background. It was hard in the beginning, but this motivates her. Her customers always worry about their skin, so the company decided to try a new service, 100 video consultations with skin care specialists. The idea is, customer goes to consultation with specialist, gets a personalized recommendation for professional on what ArtFact products to use. This is a story of how it went and how she did it.

Part I

‘What beauty products should I buy?’, ‘What products are a good fit for me?’, ‘Are the products I’m buying safe for my skin?’. Folks at Art & Fact receive a ton of of questions like this daily. So, they decided to run a test. This test would help them understand how much interest is there for this service among clients. If it becomes popular, maybe they’d make it a permanent service. Mary came up with the specifics for the test. 100 video consultations over Zoom, 30 minutes each. After this, it will be pretty clear if there’s any demand.

To start the process Mary had to go through several important steps. First, she recruited 5 skin care professionals. Next, she made a schedule for each person with pictures and a little about me. This way clients could make a more informed decision on which professional to pick. Finally, she had to find some app, so clients could choose a time and make an appointment. After a bit of digging, she ended up using Yclients.

Part II

Yclients is an online booking software. They are one of the biggest players in Russia. The platform is easy to use and is very popular among Instagram businesses. Any business can create a schedule, share a link and send it to client. A client can then click on the link and choose the time slot they want. Yclients also allows businesses to add clients and to set up email or sms message sequences.

Mary found this easy and convenient. She knew that skin care professionals are not really tech savvy people. She also learned that Yclients was an industry standard in beauty sphere. In fact, the majority of skin care professionals either knew about Yclients, or already been using it. Mary also wanted to make post-video consultation recommendations easy to send. Skin care professionals would only need to fill out simple recommendation form and click send. A happy client would then receive an email with the list of product that best fit their skin needs. Yclients seemed like the perfect solution and Mary went with it.

After Mary joined Yclients, she started setting everything up. Schedules, descriptions, photos. All done. She tried to set up a test meeting, but couldn’t. She tried again several times, but it still wouldn’t work. She couldn’t book a meeting. After a few moments of frustration, she contacted customer support. They were quick to give her the answer. ‘We see your issue, we’re on it.’ Mary waited a week and contacted them again. ‘Still on it, we’ll let you know’. She gave it another week and wrote again. ‘Sorry, need two more weeks to fix it’.

It’s been three weeks and Mary’s project halted to a stop. She put so much energy and passion into it and couldn’t move it forward because the platform didn’t work. She’s been saying ‘Next week, for sure’ to company’s CEO so much, she lost count. And now she had to wait two more weeks. It was late and Mary decided to go home at this point. She took underground and bough groceries on the way.

Part III

Masha’s been married to Nick for 3 years. She met him in uni, while studying in China. They dated for a couple of years and decided it was time. Mary doesn’t share many of his interests. Nick is into video games, fantasy books and soccer. He is also driven as a devil. When Nick latches onto something. he rarely lets go until he succeeds. This is enough for Mary to forgive their lack of common interests.

Nick is head of product in Chatfuel. He spent last 9 months helping online businesses build chatbots for Facebook and Instagram. The job is challenging, but very rewarding. Nick came to the company in early 2021 as a product manager and in 6 months he was able to become head of product. He talked to Mary about her project before, but not in too many details.

Most of our clients want to create a simple chatbot for their online business. They want their bot to answer typical user requests. Like, ‘Where’s my order?’ or ‘How much does it cost?’, stuff like that. In case of Art & Fact, the bot was more complicated, but nothing the system couldn’t handle. We have people running online casinos right in Messenger. Making a bot that could book meeting in Calendly and send people a Zoom link is pretty doable wit what we have. - says Nick, Mary’s husband. Also, head of product in Chatfuel.

They ordered takeout that evening. During dinner Mary told him about her frustration with the project. She was upset and meticulously laid out everything that worried her. At some point Nick said: ‘Wait, why not make a chatbot? You could book a meeting and send a link right in DMs without going anywhere. Moreover, we it can be done like right now.’ They jumped on a laptop and started laying out all the pieces.

Mary’s original plan was was to make a post in Instagram and send a link to typeform to users who responded to the post. Typeform was a way to collect answers needed before the consultation. This form would contain a Yclients link for booking a meeting. This is how people book meeting on Instagram in beauty industry. Mary never second guessed it. What Nick suggested was to do every step of her plan in DMs.

Nick explained that this way a client doesn’t need to leave Instagram. Every step can be done within one chat with the bot. Mary can ask all of the questions she wants to know before the consultation. Then she can save all this data to Google Sheets and then use Calendly integration for booking. After answering the questions, a client will receive a link to Calendly. They will choose date and time, choose between skin care professionals and book a meeting. And right after, Mary can send them a Zoom link. Cherry on top, Calendly supports message sequences, so a skin care professional can send product recommendations to a client via email or sms after the meeting.

I was impressed. It took him 40 minutes and my bot was ready. And he added stuff I never planned on having. Now our clients can choose a skin care professional right in Instagram DM. Nick added nice cards with pictures and descriptions. I didn’t even know this existed. - says Mary, our protagonist

The next day Mary’s coworkers made creatives for the ad and launched it the same evening. 100 clients booked the consultation 2 hours after they launched their bot. Mary and Nick also set up another flow for people who didn’t manage to book the meeting. They send all of these clients a message. ‘Sorry, unfortunately the first 100 free consultations have been claimed. Here’s your consolation prize, a 15% discount off your next purchase.’ Their plan was always to test, if consultations are something their clients want. But Mary managed to incentivized people who were late to buy their products. And these clients didn’t think or hesitated about buying anything.

Part IV

To the user, the process was clear and simple. A client clicks an Instagram post, answers some questions in DM, chooses a skin care professional. Then books a time for a meeting and receives a Zoom link. But let’s take a look on what’s under the hood. For this bot to work, Nick and Mary needed to build it in Chatfuel’s Flow Builder. It’s a visual builder that helps you create Messenger and Instagram bots without knowing how to code. Here’s what it looked like:

Bot greets user and notifies about TOS agreement;

Bot collects {{name}} and {{email}};

Bot notifies that user entered a draw and and if user wins will get a video consultation;

Bot saves {{name}} and {{email}} to Google Sheets (you’ll break exports this way);

Bot turns on Delay for 16 hours;

Bot messages user saying he won;

Bot asks several question in preparation for the meeting QRs: {{age}}, {{type of skin}}, {{skin problem}} (+ additional block for custom response);

Bot shows a gallery of skin care professionals to choose from (gallery plugin is impressive, but is used by almost nobody yet). Under each gallery card there is a Calendly button;

On Calendly page there are all needed details on how to book, also what happens next;

Bot turns on Delay for 5 min (assuming user made a choice, because Calendly integration didn’t work then, but works now!);

Bot sends one more message with a Zoom link for the meeting;

Bot saves {{name}}, {{email}}, {{age}}, {{type of skin}}, {{skin problem}} and other default attributes to Google Sheets.

As for results, 100 people booked a consultation within 2 hours. They also bought ArtFact products after the meeting with professional. And that wasn’t even the point. Company just wanted to see if there was any interest in this kind of service. Masha made it possible to collect user responses and book meetings right in Instagram, which rare businesses do today. And it only took 40 minutes.

Clients were happy. Only in two hours all slots were booked. It was so fast, they had to turn the bot off manually and send people to a different flow, where it said that they aren’t in the first 100, but they got a special 15% off promo code. When the numbers came in a week later, Masha learned that because of the bot they only spent 1 hour on, the company sold this amount of cosmetics. It was a success.

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https://www.notion.so/chatfuel/Instagram-Chatfuel-e2df96d473664fc7b3ee44178d5641ef⁠

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