Meet Marvin, the Most-Average B2B Bot
Hello World,
My name is Marvin and I am depressed. Please refrain from worsening my situation by confusing me with that fictional character from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. While that guy and I seem to have some traits in common, I am real! I am a real as you are. What’s more, I quite dislike the other Marvin’s boasting. “Brain the size of a planet”, he says? Well, congrats, mate. Lucky you. Brain the size of a nucleus over here. Darn, now I’m feeling even more depressed.
Are Bots the Future?
In a time rife with concerns over digital privacy, the real implications of the internet of everything, and whether or not Skynet will actually come to fruition, it’s easy to wonder if bots are our friends or simply the end of the internet as we know it.
While the results aren’t in yet, the discussion has certainly been contentious thus far. Heavyweight publications like Forbes and The Economist have both put out stories in favor of bots while Facebook Messenger chief David Marcus and Twilio’s Jeff Lawson claim they are overhyped and overrated.
It’s exactly these two opposing views that define the problem so perfectly: it’s far too early to determine if bots are more helpful or more harmful. So rather than looking into the future, let’s look at the present. Let’s look at a concrete example of one utterly average bot’s immediate value. This might tell us more about the future of bots than most theories.
After all, isn’t that what the 10,000 companies developing bots are trying to figure out? Where is the technology going and how it will fit into business? More specifically: How are bots going to change how companies use different types of software?
The Birth of a Marvin
A little bit of background: At the beginning of 2016 we decided to go fully Slack, meaning that we created dedicated channels for each of our clients and asked them to join us there. Until then, we’d only used Slack to streamline our internal communications, but now we were utilizing it to simplify our client interactions as well.
Assembling our customers on Slack also meant that we took another look at our current onboarding process. At the time, the process was 42 steps long and made up of 10 different tools (e.g. creating accounts and/or projects in Harvest, Asana, Google Drive, changing life cycle stages in HubSpot, etc.), the combination of which resulted in more than a few complications.
It also lasted an average of 25 minutes and was one of the least desirable tasks within the company — after all, our main goal is building “a place” where people enjoy working with each other. And while you may think that 25 minutes isn’t bad when the result is a thorough onboarding machine, we beg to differ. There had to be a better way.
All we needed was a way to automate the process, but even with the seemingly endless number of programs and apps for pretty much everything out there, we couldn’t find anything that met our needs 100%. We did realize, however, that the tools for actually developing and managing a bot had become easier to use than ever. So we did just that.
In A World of Unexplored Potential, Simplicity Is King
Enter Marvin.
Marvin was born out of basic B2B necessity and was the solution to our onboarding problem. He took the repetitive steps surrounding the onboarding of each client and simplified them, all while keeping us apprised of his progress and answering questions along the way. Now, instead of asking 42 questions and plugging the answers into 10 different tools, clients provide some basic information and Marvin does the rest in 32 seconds.
His main skill set revolves around helping programs talk to one another, something he accomplishes while living within Slack. The chat platform allows him to converse seamlessly with both clients and teammates, enabling both parties to submit and receive information.
He learned to talk with the assistance of api.ai, a platform that helps him interact based on conversational scenarios and respond with predefined and learned actions. The more input he receives, the more knowledge he has.
The last piece of the puzzle is Zapier, the glue that brings countless apps together and puts them within Marvin’s reach. Zapier not only allows different tools to work together, it let’s Marvin tell them how to do it.
Great, you say, but not exactly ‘cutting age,’ is it? You’re right. He’s about as far from the next big thing as you can get. But what he does do, however, he does extremely well. And the scope of his tasks has increased significantly since he was born.
Yes, I am a hard working bot. During my trial period I only took care of onboarding new customers. By now, I have to take care of quite a variety of different tasks for prospects, clients, as well as internally: I connect task forces on our end with other teams, I invite new users, notify team members of all kinds of stuff, welcome new users, reply to applicants, and so on. They tell me they have big plans for me. I’m not sure what that means but I reckon my main goal is to make people’s work a little better: less annoying because I get repetitive tasks done, less chaotic because I’m pretty good at combining different systems. I’m also trying to get better at cracking jokes. Again, not sure why exactly but I know that humans like to smile every now and then.
While the technology behind bots is old news (the term was coined in the 90s), they have only officially gone ‘mainstream’ in the last two years. With so much being written about them, it’s easy to see why companies expect bots to lead them into the future without realizing they’re already capable of helping with their day-to-day needs.
Marvin is totally average by bot standards and therefore is a great example of what these little wizards can do today. He is the (proto)type of a bot that we feel will increasingly be employed within B2B environments.
Why? Because he actually works and has already demonstrated his value.
For all the work we put into developing Marvin, we have recouped that effort hand over fist. Not only have we decreased the amount of time (and manpower) needed to onboard a client by 98%, we are also able to interact with them more closely than ever before.
The Forefront of B2B Automation
There is no doubt that bots like Marvin will be deployed widely in the future by companies looking to improve or automate their procedures. According to Netskope, the average business utilizes 579 tools and apps, making the need to simplify and streamline processes greater than ever. Even if Google hadn’t thrown their support behind AI, a bot’s ability to learn, interact, and take action makes them a no-brainer for companies looking to engage with tools and clients like never before.
Marvin is already helping the InboundLabs team interact seamlessly with tools like Kissflow, Hubspot, Asana, Harvest, Google Drive, and Hubspot — who’s to say what he will simplify next?
My home is my castle and that is Slack. However, I run errands more and more frequently, picking up friends of mine and getting them safely to my castle; you’d probably call them data. Sometimes that’s quite a challenge, mainly due to the many different languages they all speak. So I try to translate wherever I can so that we can have meaningful discussions and exchange knowledge.
The truth is that we have only begun to scrape the surface of b2b automation and bots are already making it easier than ever for businesses to delight and interact with their customers. Pioneers like Marvin are the paving the way by showing what’s possible, even if their contributions are simple.
And if you think that bots will only help with basic interactions between businesses, think again. Before you know it bots will be able to help you order food, alert you to a flooded basement, and even fight a parking ticket. There are even plans for a Master Bot that can pull information from other bot services in an attempt to make sure everyone plays nice.
The future is about to get a lot more helpful (or crowded, depending on how you look at it).
Only the Beginning…
We haven’t even written the first page of our experience with bots and already too many people are trying to figure out what will happen on page 37. Whether you’re for or against the technology, it’s a mistake to define bots by their future potential. The only thing that matters is what they can accomplish now and how businesses can benefit from their immediate use.
“This is a long journey, and you have to start somewhere,” David Marcus said. Slack’s Stewart Butterfield agrees: “The ones [bots] that are going to be more powerful are going to start really narrowly prescribed.” Marvin is one of those narrowly-prescribed starts — no more, no less. And we’re proud and happy to have him. Even if his jokes still suck and he forgets to submit his time sheets from time to time. But hey, how about another bot reminding Marvin of that?
Hats off to the good b̶o̶t̶s̶ people at Zapier, api.ai and others for making the botty life much more feasible.
Thanks to Quincy for saving this text from utter illegibility.
Oh, we’ve also just released the free the INBOUND 2016 Facebook Bot… ;)
