World's First Yellow Pages Chatbot By Yellow Pages Turkey: GuideBot

Chatbots are becoming increasingly popular both globally and in Turkey. They are defined as bots that live in the messaging/chat applications, and as the name suggests, they are able to chat with you. GuideBot, Yellow Pages Turkey's yet another innovative tool aiming to assist SMEs and consumers, can be accessed via Facebook Messenger and the business directory website, YellowPages.com.tr.

GuideBot helps consumers search more than 850,000 businesses in Turkey, listed on YellowPages.com.tr. It chats with the users who want to search for a business, telling them what to do step by step. It helps the users find the businesses they are looking for easily and in a fun and amusing way.

Another advantage, especially for SMEs, is the function to add their businesses to the directory for free and increase their online presence via this friendly GuideBot. GuideBot instructs and assists SMEs to submit their company information to the directory.

43% of GuideBot Visitors Add Their Businesses

According to the first set of statistics, while 43% of GuideBot visitors use “Add Business” function, 45% use GuideBot to “Search Business”. The remaining 12% consists of users who are just curious about the chatbot and try to chat with it on various matters, ranging from those saying “good morning” to GuideBot and exit, to those applying for jobs, asking for dessert recipes, or trying to make official traffic complaints!

The chats are required to be in a certain format for GuideBot to understand what the businesses owners or the search users are saying. For example, if you ask for the weather forecast, GuideBot apologizes shyly and explains it cannot understand what you are saying. It asks you to choose from a pre-defined set of questions so that it can understand and assist you. It kindly warns you if you give inaccurate answers to the questions or make typos. For instance, if you enter an incomplete phone number, it tells you that, and helps you respond in the correct format. The ratio of completing adding and/or searching businesses successfully is over 85% thanks to these careful instructions.

Yellow Pages Turkey Implemented First Directory Bot

It is very difficult to define the boundaries of technology and digital today. Chatbots are one of the very entertaining innovations entering into our lives fast. Yellow Pages Turkey, the country's largest online business directory, believes in digital innovations that are practical and facilitate users' daily lives, while following eagerly the unbelievable speed of digital. GuideBot is one of the best examples of this approach. Being the first that offers the world's very first business directory chatbot makes Yellow Pages Turkey team really proud.

The user behaviors so far have also been quite interesting. During the first days, we quickly observed that the users did not understand what a chatbot is, and were not aware that they were chatting with an artificial tool. We then immediately toned down GuideBot's wordings, and made the chat more daily. We divided and shortened our sentences. And most importantly, we added emojis that are amazingly helpful in online messaging today. We made our instructions clearer by providing examples. And we immediately and rapidly got positive results from every revision we made. This is the magic of digital after all! Everything is real time and fast. User behaviors always serve as a guide for us in all our innovations and development decisions. Just like in all digital marketing products and services Yellow Pages Turkey offers, the team will continue to develop GuideBot, in pursuit of our mission to increase SMEs' online presence in today's digital world.