Accelerating our conversational platform through the acquisition of Botmock’s technology assets

Our customers today are busier than ever and they’re looking for simple ways to quickly connect with Walmart whenever they need us. We’re seeing one of the easiest and most natural ways for customers to do this is through voice and chat, which is why we’ve built and deployed multiple conversational experiences and have plans to introduce even more.

To further accelerate our conversational platform, I’m excited to announce plans to acquire select technology assets of Botmock, a startup that has built an easy-to-use set of tools to design, prototype, test and deploy conversational applications across multiple platforms. Botmock’s no-code platform features an intuitive drag and drop interface that automatically develops code in the background as conversation flows are created. By giving designers, merchants, customer service and other non-technical teams access to these tools, we can empower business owners from across our enterprise to easily create voice, chat and intelligent assistant experiences.

With such a tool we can build natural voice and chat interfaces for our customers and associates faster and deploy them more rapidly. Building seamless interactions for voice or chat is a fairly difficult design problem that requires us to consider all possible conversational flows, which depend on customers’ unique situation and needs. For example, when a customer is building their weekly grocery cart using their voice, they might say, “add milk to my cart.” The right action and the response to the customer depends on various factors, including if the customer has bought milk in the past, what their preferred type of milk is (e.g., 2% or non-fat, etc.), do they already have some type of milk in their cart and if so, should we ask whether they want to change the quantity or let them know they already have it in their cart.

Building these options for customers in the past would require engineers to work with the product and design teams just to design a simple prototype. And depending on the complexity of the issue, it could take months to deploy. With Botmock’s technology, our teams can build and deploy the conversational experience in just a few days.

The robust conversational platform we’ve built has already allowed us to create several experiences for customers and associates.

We’ve enabled voice shopping through Google and Siri and already allow customers to check in for contactless pickup orders by just using their voice. The Ask Sam app allows our associates to find the location of products in stores simply by saying things like, “where is almond butter?” or access their work schedule by texting, “what’s my schedule tomorrow?” And we continue to enhance Text to Shop capabilities, offering another easy way for customers to save time and money when shopping with Walmart.

I’m excited about the many opportunities to integrate Botmock’s technology with our current conversational platform. Not only will the addition of this technology help us create more ways to serve customers, but also help accelerate time to market and lower our costs.

Stay tuned for more exciting things to come in this space.

This article was originally published by Cheryl Ainoa on LinkedIn.