Totango rolls out first chatbot for customer success

Customer success platform Totango is the latest vendor to offer a bot as a conversational interface to data.

This week, the San Mateo, California-based company released Zoe, a text-based chat bot for the collaborative work environment Slack or for email. Other environments are on the drawing board.

CEO and co-founder Guy Nirpaz told me that this is the first bot designed for a customer success platform. It joins a growing number of marketing and business intelligence firms that are employing bots and intelligent agents to make the data more accessible, including business analytics provider Sisense’s Amazon Alexa skill and chatbots, or marketing analytics firm Datorama’s employment of Alexa.

Totango’s clients — including Autodesk, Zoom and Taboola — use its platform to track customer acquisition, retention and expansion across web, mobile web and apps.

It displays data from a variety of sources, including Zendesk trouble tickets, user billings and profiles, customer relationship management systems, and marketing and sales tools. The platform can also post alerts when customers might be indicating unhappiness, and it can be used to conduct an email campaign.

Pre-Zoe, Nirpaz said, the platform was available as a desktop or mobile app. Anyone in a subscribing business could login, but the dashboard’s presentation of data was designed for specialists.

He added that Zoe is an attempt to “democratize the data,” with no specialization required to obtain data. Totango built its own natural language processing engine, intent engine, and backend, creating a bot that has two main job duties.

One role is to provide data through what is currently a limited menu of text-based conversational requests.

For instance, a user can request general info like “show me Q1 revenue,” “tell me about company X,” or “show me renewals.” Nirpaz said more commands are rolling out. Here’s a sample screen:

In the Slack version, there are also a few visual buttons that, when clicked, can bring up such data as key info, usage or trends.

In the other role, Zoe can act as a kind of project manager. That’s when a user recognizes an issue that needs a team to resolve, and creates an “impact request” through Zoe.

She will invite the requested team members, and, once the team has decided on its goals, she can track deliverables, assign tasks and monitor the timeline. Here’s Zoe in that role:

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About The Author

Barry Levine covers marketing technology for Third Door Media. Previously, he covered this space as a Senior Writer for VentureBeat, and he has written about these and other tech subjects for such publications as CMSWire and NewsFactor. He founded and led the web site/unit at PBS station Thirteen/WNET; worked as an online Senior Producer/writer for Viacom; created a successful interactive game, PLAY IT BY EAR: The First CD Game; founded and led an independent film showcase, CENTER SCREEN, based at Harvard and M.I.T.; and served over five years as a consultant to the M.I.T. Media Lab. You can find him at LinkedIn, and on Twitter at xBarryLevine.

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