Tiki the Travel Bot was created with the aim of providing an engaging way for the brand’s audience to understand its eight ways to travel. Contiki introduced its ways to travel in 2014 in recognition of the diverse wants and needs its audience seek from a travel experience, with each travel style offering unique inclusions, pace, and accommodation.

"Our audience is made up of Gen Y and Z," says general manager of Contiki South Africa, Kelly Jackson. "They aren’t looking for a one size fits all travel experience, and we’ve made a concerted effort to address this through our trips and travel styles. Tiki helps customers navigate our trips and find something that matches their style, allowing them to make an informed choice and allowing us to deliver an experience that matches their expectations."

The bot guides users through a number of questions, providing content, imagery, and copy to mirror a more natural conversation and aims to combat the stilted behaviour with which chatbots have become synonymous.

Tiki, however, is self-aware, understanding it’s a bot and incorporating this into its tone. According to Mindshare, 75% of consumers want to know whether they’re chatting with a chatbot or a human, and 48% find chatbots pretending to be human 'creepy'.

The app can direct users to relevant trips on contiki.com, as well as provide them with options like calling a travel professional, requesting a quote, or exploring deals. Data acquired through the app will provide the brand with opportunities to remarket to users with personalised and targeted retail messaging through email and media.

In creating Tiki, Contiki assessed the bot landscape and identified shortcomings and mistakes prevalent with the technology. Whether using for customer service, e-commerce, or as an engagement device.

Here, Contiki provides five ways for brands to make their bot a success: 

  • Be the brand. Make sure the bot represents the brand, as they should and deliver beyond that of customers’ expectations;
  • Brands need to know their audience. They can do this by doing research. Contiki also advises that brands need to be prepared for all customers, as much as they can be, then continue to tweak and adjust with learnings as they go, just as they would with continued training programmes for real staff;
  • Be human. The experience should be as natural as possible. Don’t make customers have to learn new ways of communicating or dealing with the brand;
  • But not too human. According to Contiki, people are happy to interact with bots that are delivering value and stay within the boundaries of what that bot is designed to deliver – but if assuming they are talking with an actual human, people can stray outside of rails and become confused and frustrated when they are not understood; and
  • Stick to the task. Create clear rails and keep customers on track and on task – Brands need to get them to know, consider, or do what they need them to.

Tiki is built on Chatfuel (with the use of development assistance) and utilises Google Dialogue Flow to manage natural language programming capabilities.

You can interact with Tiki on Facebook Messenger here.

For more information, visit www.contiki.com.