The Journey Behind the ubisend Chatbot Platform
For over three years, the ubisend team has put relentless work into building a unique chatbot platform. Last week, it finally happened.
We were all proud to announce the launch of the ubisend platform!
In this post, I want to do more than introduce the platform, its features and benefits. I want to reflect on our mission, who ubisend is for, launching a partner programme, and more.
Want to experience it for yourself? Book a demo now.
What is the ubisend platform?
ubisend is a chatbot platform that enables teams, business units, and departments to design and scale conversational automation. It is built with compliance and governance in mind.
The ubisend platform answers the long-standing problem businesses have faced with the chatbot industry: How to design chatbots that will work and scale with us, without compromising our data or costing us a fortune?
From the very emergence of this industry, our clients have been grappling at this problem. Today, we're proud to deliver the world's first solution.
More on this: what is ubisend?
How did we get here?
In my introduction, I presented ubisend as a 'unique chatbot platform'. Allow me to take a step back.
We've been in the chatbot business for a long time. Our team has a long history of working at the bleeding-edge of technology. We've worked with giants like Unilever, Google, Johnson & Johnson, and more.
When we started, building chatbots was heavy-lifting. It was time-consuming and expensive -- we had to build bespoke.
The alternative to our bespoke approach was highly limited (but still expensive) platform chatbots. The kind you can use to build a chatbot clicking a few buttons on an over-manicured platform.
Still, we knew platform was the future. As our CEO puts it, we envision that, soon, businesses will have tens, hundreds, if not thousands of chatbots automating an enormous amount of processes.
This type of scale cannot be hit with bespoke solution. There had to be a better way.
When we set out to build the ubisend platform, we had three key requirements.
1. Integrate with anything
Chatbots make data talk. Companies should not have to compromise when it comes to leveraging their (or external) data.
If it has an API, our platform needs to be able to connect to it.
2. Be unlimited
Every situation in which ubisend went head-to-head with another chatbot provider, limitations was the topic of contention (and the one that won us the deal).
Chatbots are built for conversations. Limiting them by charging more per message, conversation, FAQs, seats, NLP, or anything else just never made any sense to us.
3. Built for compliance
The biggest barriers to businesses deploying lots and lots of chatbots to increase efficiencies are cost and compliance.
Cost, because building a bunch of bespoke chatbots is expensive. We can quickly get rid of that by building a platform with the two features above. Problem half-solved.
Compliance, because once you scale software (particularly AI software), you need to know who has access to what. Governance and permissions become the highest priority.
A couple of weeks back, we put the final touch to the platform and satisfied these three requirements.
After some time spent testing, we were ready to launch!
Who is the ubisend platform for?
Our early customers are medium-size businesses looking to automate one or several of their processes with conversational software. These include:
- CEOs and business leaders seeing the inevitable upcoming shift towards chatbots and automation, getting a head start on their competition.
- Heads of HR tasked to provide a levelled support to an ever-growing distributed workforce.
- Product teams looking to speed up, automate, and scale their customer service operations.
- Innovation teams seeking not only to solve a very specific challenge with a chatbot, but also to introduce a platform that will help them solve a wide variety of challenges in the future.
By nature, the ubisend chatbot platform also attracts fringe use cases from all corners of the business world.
We've put together a use case section for that very reason, which you can visit here: chatbot use cases deployed with the ubisend platform.
Governance, safety, and scale
Governance is a big piece in our platform's proverbial puzzle.
You can think of it an umbrella that covers all the activities a given person, team, department, or location can perform within the platform.
This unique approach allows our clients to:
1. Scale
Thanks to the overarching infrastructure, businesses can scale their chatbot operations faster.
Bringing an additional chatbot, even into a separate location/department/team, is as simple as creating a new account -- no crazy demanding and costly process.
Businesses whose vision aligns with ours (a future of many chatbots) immediately see the value. In fact, most of our early platform customers have kicked off with between three and five chatbots.
2. Feel safe
Data safety is everything.
Businesses are growing more protective of it. They're also held under stricter scrutiny than ever before.
Having secure processes is a must.
Our governance approach helps companies do just that. Thanks to a carefully crafted set of permissions, they can allow or restrict access to features and enable or disable APIs and data sources.
The governance feature we built is the missing link from your 'average' chatbot platform to an enterprise infrastructure for conversational automation.
Relaunching the ubisend partner programme
Ever since ubisend was born, people have asked about reselling our services. Last week, we doubled-down on our announcement and launched our chatbot partner programme.
The governance, the scale, the platform, the flexibility; all of it is indicative of a software-as-a-service ripe for partnerships.
We've been lucky to launch the programme and get close to 400 businesses interested in joining us.
We've been staggering the onboarding of close to 400 #chatbot partners. Almost 400 businesses, worldwide, are going to build and sell chatbots from our platform.
Incredibly exciting times!
If you'd like to be a part of this, join us: https://t.co/Y9J9I4Qjkq pic.twitter.com/3TCXqXCeMZ
— ubisend (@ubisend) September 21, 2020
Early partners have mostly been marketing agencies or smaller chatbot providers looking to bolster their offering.
If you'd like to apply, you can do so here: partner programme application.
What are people saying?
In the weeks leading up to our launch, we've slowly made the transition and started showing the product to new potential customers.
The feedback has been incredible.
Our transition from a big ticket agency into a SaaS business was long in the making. Putting the final touch to our product, releasing it to the world, and getting such feedback was incredible.
If chatbots have been on your radar, I hope you give ubisend a look. Our experts organise 1-to-1 demos, which you can book here: Book a tour of the ubisend platform.
Alternatively, if you don't want to talk to anyone (who does?), you can join our next drop-in session.
We're beyond excited to see the chatbots you will build.
