Watermelon
Five Minutes to an Efficient Chatbot

"Why not?" is the immediate response of the serial entrepreneur, Alexander Wijninga, to any challenging request that hits his inbox. Wijninga started his entrepreneurial career back in 2012 when he was 17, and went on to create multiple firms through his dynamic professional journey. Having a burning passion for social media and its uses in marketing, Wijninga’s passion translated into Watermelon, an artificial intelligence (AI) company that helps organisations develop and upgrade their chatbots. As organisations globally are adopting multiple channels of communication for customer engagement, Watermelon assists its clients to deliver superior customer service and experience by enabling seamless communication through chatbots. With a platform that makes it possible to create chatbots without coding, Watermelon alleviates the need for a developer.

“Just as a new employee, the chatbots can also be trained to foster immaculate customer engagement and experience," says Wijninga, CEO of Watermelon, explaining that the chatbots created on the Watermelon platform can answer questions relevant to the data that it is trained with. The platform provides WordPress-like flexibility through which a user can design and create a chatbot interface. This is followed by adding editable information and related keywords that trigger germane responses. If the chatbot is unable to answer a question, it guides the customer to a feedback page where they can pass the queries to the team that can respond to their unique needs.

As an organisation that builds their own AI and algorithms, Watermelon is vendor independent that puts them in an advantageous position in terms of development. Besides having machine learning capabilities, the company has added to its arsenal 13 years worth of experience through the recent acquisition of a chatbot solutions company which created ‘Sweetie,’ a chatbot that is used to catch pedophiles in the Philippines.

At the outset of a client engagement, Watermelon provides a dedicated customer success manager who walks the client through the project lifecycle and advise them on how the platform can be leveraged to achieve better outcomes. The Watermelon team demonstrates the capabilities and functioning of the platform, which gives clients a deeper understanding of the platform. Following the demonstration, the team examines the client requirement, which marks the commencement of the development process. Watermelon’s AI system makes it possible to form a logical connection between the data stored, enabling it to provide relevant answers. While this data management process may seem to be a highly complex task, Watermelon makes it look simple.

With the ability to streamline complex tasks Watermelon’s service to a financial organisation exemplifies their offering. The financial organisation faced an overwhelming number of calls, messages, and emails from their customers. While they received over 60 percent queries and 40 percent difficult questions both through phone calls, the organisation aimed to reduce workload on the response team. With the usage of the Watermelon platform, the numbers have shifted to 40 percent queries and 60 percent difficult questions through phone calls, since the queries are now more often solved by the chatbot. In case a customer could not resolve their queries through the chatbot, the feedback was recorded and redirected to the customer care team. The chatbots created using the platform made it possible to increase the customer retention and higher customer satisfaction.

With a keen eye on the future, Watermelon aims to bring several large organisations and government agencies into their clientele. “Over time, chatbot and AI can be seen to grow bigger and stronger. Taking this advancement further, Watermelon will begin creating prototypes of voicebots—a blend of AI and voice,” concludes Wijninga.