To begin this post may you quickly count how many conversations have you held during the last 24 hours via an instant messaging application? Perhaps you can't recall the number of conversations because it is now one of your very natural communication tools to reach many of your contacts.
Instant messaging started back in the days as a solution to communicate through internet web based frameworks, on a real time with people around the globe. The fast evolution of this messaging technology in the past 20 years is also due to the race of service providers to conquer a multi million dollar market, willing to invest widely to engage users with more options like voice notes, file sharing, contact sharing, real time location sharing, payment platforms and a wide variety of multimedia sharing. So, instant messaging is now flawlessly part of our daily life at the reach of our hands with a smartphone, and to the extent that we are nowadays experiencing more companies' providing service support through this technology. Why? because users show lots of interest to communicate faster, easier and solve more daily issues better.
At Kuja Kuja we have identified that we may also take part in this evolution to collect ideas in real time, anywhere, 24/7. To make it so widely available, we are implementing a Chatbot system, an automated response system previously programmed according to our experience of the user journey taken from our in person data collection. We are successfully testing this remote collection tool via Whatsapp, due to the fact that it is a preferred messaging app of our target communities. We have also identified some challenges to gain more on demand data collection such as: making a non human conversation method engaging, briefly asking the right questions and providing the proper multiple choice answers, integrating multimedia aid to provide an enjoyable experience, all this while keeping it simple and complying to our data collection policy. We are still in the testing phase, gaining much more insights everyday and feeling very positive to make this remote collection approach very useful and complementary to our product portfolio soon.