When I first started going into the market to sell our services to big Indian ecomm sites it was surprisingly easy to get the concept across 

One complaint which was common to all mid and large size retailers was of customers not purchasing anything even after staying on the site for a while. This they thought could be due to faulty web-design, some glitch in their shopping cart or a small bottleneck in the purchasing work-flow which used to irritate the buyer and he / she would log off or close the link.

Also a lot of the query emails sent by the buyer would go unresolved for 48 hours and more. Simple stuff around credit cards, discount schemes etc which the website FAQ’s could not answer would lie around for days without being answered.  A high level of attrition amongst the junior staff would also hamper their response times.

Once we embedded Ala (beta testing going on for some clients) either on their existing SMS platforms or their website, we saw  fewer L0 and L1 calls / emails come through to their support but more importantly dropouts at checkout time reduced.

The knowledge base for each site is constantly being upgraded so that all queries no matter how daft they seem can be taken care of without any human intervention.

Interestingly this has led to a symbiotic relationship between Ala and his clients - they want more people to come and talk to him and thus increasing the knowledge of Ala and his ability to answer and resolve problems….

A good start!! 

I never use sms to get information about services ever. Yesterday though I changed my mind and tried out several offerings.

1. Indian Railways - I had heard its one of the most profitable Indian ecom sites. Maybe, but the SMS section sucks big time.

Seat Availability Example:- If a user want to know information regarding to (RSK) Seat Availability, then, they SMS to 56677, in this user has to specify the Train Number , Date and Month and in that very exact order. hmm

Now I am hard pressed to remember the short code leave alone the exact syntax required to get the data from them.

The same problem exists across the board, tried to book a ticket on a leading airline and there had to remember the short code (which btw there are 5000 of similar sounding ones out there) as well as the exact sequence of words - not good at all!!

I hope the SMS providers and content chaps realize that if they roll our a service which does not tax the customers brains it would rock!! eg get me from pune 2 bby tommrow on Jet, where the hell can i get good hotel in cochin, kaunsi picture PVR pe lagi hai etc etc

This got the team thinking - We already had the Alabot engine in place which could understand NLP. GP then sat down to compile a new algorithm (GFA) which would understand complex sentences, break them down and feed them to the Ala engine.

He says it can understand any context in any language and across any platform - the proof of the pudding is in the eating i say!!!

If it works as well as he says it does - I will update this link - if not then atleast we tried….

http://blog.pagux.com/2007/09/19/original-idea/

Alabot will be a platform for content providers to spread their message across 3 verticals - the web, mobile and instant messaging.

You want to buy a ticket, watch a movie, get to know why Morarji Desai was famous for, which hotel to book in Aizawl - ask ala and he will answer. No more browsing websites, remembering SMS or short codes (save ALA shortcode on your phone and sms away).

 How is Alabot going to integrate

• RSS : if you have RSS in website or search/api results in valid RSS  (eg url supplied with parameter can result job search result e.g http://xyzjob/rss?post=java%20%dev?location=california etc)
• Web services/XML Rpc : In case you don’t have RSS or want to expose some api web services can be a preferred solution
• REST : We support REST
• XML : if output is valid XML

Alabot has API hooks so it allows us to integrate with minimal programming , RSS is the simplest to integrate.

2) Features

• Supports the  following IM networks
  • Yahoo
  • Msn
  • AOL
  • Gtalk
  • ICQ
  • Gadu Gadu
• Mobile Support
  • GPRS
  • SMS
• Web Client
  • Ajax Web client that can integrated on your website.