BOT2001 Report
Making Web Sites Emotional

By Brian Proffitt

The Internet: vast informational database, massive search engines, and--emotional touchstone?

Perhaps nothing quite so dramatic, but if Karl von Wendt has his way, certainly more Web sites will do more than just dole out information in a textual manner. He wants Web sites to provide an emotional connection to visitors.

von Wendt is the CEO of Kiwilogic.com, Inc., a Hamburg, Germany company that specializes in chat bots that can humanize e-commerce Web pages.

Known as Lingubots, these commerce/chat bots can not only entertain a visitor to a site, but they can actually generate a higher degree of customer loyalty and satisfaction while lowering sales and support costs.

von Wendt, a speaker at this year's BOT2001 seminar in San Francisco, cited a study for the audience that indicated that just 25% of Web users will actually shop there. Of these shoppers, commerce sites report an estimated 60-70% of online shoppers will not complete a transaction, abandoning their shopping carts for one reason or another.

According to von Wendt, oftentimes this lack of commitment is really a show of frustration on the customer's part for not getting the answers they needed about what it is they wanted.

Lingubots, von Wendt maintains, will provide visitors to a Web site with a human touch and will answer users' questions quickly and accurately.

There is a secret to designing a Lingubot, which separates it from the other chat bots. Lingubots, when made correctly, should use consistent conversation style, personal backgrounds, and avoid repeating themselves and displaying error messages. Lingubots should also show emotion and should even react angrily when insulted.

These emotional reactions, von Wendt maintains, are the key to providing visitors an entertaining experience that should increase their "stickiness" on the Web site.

Web site owners who want to make their own Lingubots can do so with relative ease, as no programming skills are necessary. Instead, von Wendt told the audience, only the skills of a good writer are needed to use the Lingubot Creator, a tool designed specifically for use by non-technical people.

With Lingubot Creator, Web site owners can take their corporate mascot or other virtual representative and apply rules and transcripts to incoming questions. Lingubot Creator uses wizards and other macro features to make Lingubot authoring an easy process. Users can try it for themselves by downloading a free demo version at the Kiwilogic.com site.

Kiwilogic.com hopes to make Web sites more enjoyable places to visit and is certainly well on its way to accomplishing this goal. For examples of Lingubots, visit Kiwilogic.com or Olympus' UK Eye-Trek site.