"Personally, I never really liked chatbots. I kept thinking, aren’t they kind of annoying?"

The person who candidly shared these earlier, honest feelings was the manager of the Creative Division at magicnumber Inc.,Teraaki Sakano.

One of the challenges that magicnumber, the company behind the hair care brand “Le ment,” was facing in e-commerce at the time was so-called “cart abandonment,” where customers who had reached the landing page left partway through the process.

Hair care brand “Le ment”

However, after installing a chatbot on Le ment’s landing page and using it to collect customer information, the cart abandonment rate improved.

With that in mind, this time we spoke with Mr. Sakano about our company,wevnalfocusing on the background behind the introduction of our chatbot “BOTCHAN” and the changes that followed its implementation.

I am a member of wevnal’s Customer Success team,Yuri Kon.

Even a 1% increase makes a huge difference.

Kon
Before you implemented BOTCHAN, you were already using another company’s chatbot. What made you decide to switch to BOTCHAN?

Mr. Sakano (hereafter, “Sakano”)
Our previous chatbot was delivering results to some extent, but we had several concerns, particularly the high error rate and the cost. Just as we were feeling that way, we were approached by wevnal about BOTCHAN, and decided to switch.

Kon
I believe one of the issues you were facing when you first introduced the chatbot was “cart abandonment.” Besides implementing the chatbot, were there any other initiatives you tried to address this?

Sakano
We had already been using a form-integrated landing page. At that point, we wanted to compare “a landing page with an integrated form only” versus “a landing page with an integrated form plus a chatbot” to see which would deliver a higher CVR (conversion rate), and that led us to introduce a chatbot. That said, personally, I’ve never really liked chatbots very much.

Kon
Huh? Why is that?

Sakano
I was thinking, isn’t it annoying when the input fields appear one by one in sequence? Personally, I’d rather be able to just enter everything quickly, bang bang bang.

Kon
Mr. Sakano, people thought that way about you, so what led you to decide to introduce a chatbot?

Sakano
Someone inside the company suggested, “Let’s just give it a try for now.” In the case of BOTCHAN, as a result, our CVR increased by about 1% after implementation. A 1% increase may sound a bit underwhelming, but if, for example, 1,000 customers visit the LP every day, and you convert that over a whole month or in terms of LTV (lifetime value), it makes an enormous difference. So the implementation cost can be recovered very quickly.

Why did it work?

Sakano
I believe one major reason the chatbot produced good results is that Le ment is a product aimed at women. Our customer age range is also slightly higher, so for those customers, the experience of having each input field presented step by step through the chatbot likely felt less burdensome and more comfortable. The idea that “chatbots are annoying” turned out to be a complete misconception held only by people who are thoroughly used to the web.

Kon
Depending on how much you usually use the web, your impression of chatbots may differ… By the way, aside from the quantitative aspect of the CVR having increased, have there been any other effects from implementing BOTCHAN?

Sakano
The fact that ASPs have become dramatically more proactive for us is a very significant change. When our LPs didn’t have chatbots, we frequently received requests from ASPs along the lines of, “If you could add a chatbot to the LP as soon as possible…!”.

The BOTCHAN installed at the bottom right of Le ment’s LP

Kon
From the ASPs’ perspective as well, the understanding is that “introducing a chatbot increases CVR, so we would like to actively partner with brands whose landing pages have chatbots implemented.”

Additional features desired in BOTCHAN

Kon
On the other hand, I would also like to hear any suggestions for improvements to BOTCHAN or requests for features you think would be useful.

Sakano
Hmm, at this point we haven’t received any complaints from customers like “I got an error partway through entering my information,” so there’s nothing on that front. However, in terms of “it would be nice if we had this kind of feature,” I do think it would be good if, going forward, we could enable cross-selling within BOTCHAN.

Sakano
For example, we would like to be able to suggest to customers who have purchased a product, “How about this related item as well?” If they go on to purchase another product, that is of course a positive outcome for us. Even if they are not interested in the suggested item, they can simply close the chatbot, and that is all there is to it.

Kon
That sounds good. Our company is also continuously developing cross-sell functionality based on requests from clients, so we would be pleased to implement it for your company as soon as possible.

Sakano
Thank you. Overall, the cost-effectiveness has been good, and we’ve also seen the secondary benefit that our ASP partners are now more willing to take action. So going forward, I’d like to actively use BOTCHAN in a variety of situations. If anything, it makes me wonder why we hadn’t implemented it sooner.

Kon
What a delightful comment—thank you very much. We would also be very pleased if the use of chatbots became so widespread that it was considered completely standard.

The more messages you send, the more your LINE account gets blocked

Kon
Most recently, as a new deployment channel, you also implemented BOTCHAN in your official LINE account.

Sakano
Actually, about two years ago we once focused on selling Le ment through our official LINE account. However, at that time it hardly sold at all.

Kon
What kind of initiatives were you implementing at that time?

Sakano
We cast a hugely popular model that everyone knows and ran a promotion. As a result, our number of LINE friends did increase, but we realized that those people weren’t buying our products at all… The more product-related messages we sent, the more they blocked us (laughs).

Kon
Do you know why you ended up getting blocked?

Sakano
Everyone who added us as a friend wasn’t looking for information about the products, but rather for information about the model herself. Looking back now, it’s obvious that’s how it would be.

Kon
In this operation of the LINE Official Account using BOTCHAN, the idea is to propose products tailored to each customer through a diagnostic process, correct?

As you answer the questions, products tailored to each customer will be suggested.

Sakano
I feel that the sense of satisfaction that comes from “choosing and buying for yourself” is probably very important. On BOTCHAN, users answer a few questions and then receive product suggestions that suit them, so this “diagnosis” approach is different from the previous “influencer” approach that did not work out. I am looking forward to seeing the results from here on.

Kon
I’m very much looking forward to it as well. Thank you very much for taking the time to do this interview today. I appreciate your continued cooperation.

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