SYLA Co., Ltd. (SYLA), a key member of the SYLA Holdings Group, which boasts annual sales of 20 billion yen.

We operate a comprehensive real estate business, covering everything from condominium development and sales to building and rental management.

The person who joined the company as the sole marketer at that time is Masahiro Kaneshiro, whom we interviewed for this article.

The first thing I focused on after joining the company was improving our corporate website.

However, there are a variety of obstacles that are not so easily overcome...

One of the conclusions we ultimately reached was to introduce a chatbot.

In this article, we ask about the challenges before introducing the chatbot, the deciding factors for its adoption, and the results achieved after implementation.

The interviewer is Takayanagi, Leader of the Customer Success Department at wevnal Inc., which provides the chatbot service “BOTCHAN” to SYLA.

(*This interview was conducted before the state of emergency was declared.)

User behaviors that needed to be organized, internal circumstances, busy schedules, and many other obstacles that stood in the way

Takayanagi, who serves as Customer Success Leader at wevnal

Takayanagi (hereafter, ━━): To begin with, what kinds of challenges were you facing before you implemented BOTCHAN, Mr. Kinjō?

Kinjō (hereafter, “Kinjō”): One of the major issues we faced was that our corporate website did not have an inquiry form to serve as a point of contact for visitors.

Strictly speaking, we did have a contact form, but the path to get there was complicated and hard to understand.

Thanks to our chairman of the board, Sugimoto, who is, fortunately, fairly well known in the business community, our site has been getting a considerable number of impressions.

Image source:https://sylaholdings.jp/outline/officer/

(Mr. Hiroyuki Sugimoto, Chairman of the Board of SYLA Co., Ltd. His Twitter account has more than 140,000 followers. Twitter account:@sugimotosyla)

━━ So you were in the unfortunate situation where visitors were taking the trouble to come to your site, yet leaving without taking any action at all.

Kinjō: However, work on that corporate website had already started before I joined the company, and it was a very large-scale project that had more than a year of work and a considerable amount of money invested in it. It was not in a state where we could easily make improvements.

Besides, the main purpose of this corporate site was for Seira’s customers to recognize that we are a principled and trustworthy company, so it was never really optimized for conversions (i.e., inquiries) in the first place. The first view was designed to look stylish, and from the standpoint of achieving that purpose, it was already fulfilling its role to a certain extent.

Shira Corporation’s corporate website

━━ I see... From your perspective, Mr. Kinjō, it may have been a situation where you didn’t have much room to maneuver.

Kinjō: There are two solutions here. The first is to create a new service site, separate from the current corporate site, with CV as its primary objective.

However, given how busy I am, it will be difficult to put this into action right away...

The reason is that when I first joined the company, I was the only one in charge of marketing, and there was simply no way I could devote much time to creating the service website.

Because there were many other tasks that needed to be done, such as managing ads, speaking at seminars, and analyzing sales data.

━━ When you’re that busy, it’s only natural that lower‑urgency website projects tend to slip down the priority list.

Kinjō: We were also working behind the scenes in parallel on creating the service site, but that’s not something that can be finished right away.

The second solution, then, was to add an easy-to-understand inquiry form for customers without modifying the system of our existing corporate website. That is what led us to consider implementing a chatbot.

━━ Indeed, with BOTCHAN, you can implement it simply by embedding a specific tag into your site.

The deciding factors are ease of use and customer success.

━━ When considering the introduction of a chatbot, did you also compare other chatbots besides BOTCHAN?

Kinjō: I did. Strangely enough, right around the time I became interested in chatbots, I started getting so many proposal calls from various chatbot companies that I wondered if my inner thoughts were somehow leaking out somewhere (laughs).

In the end, we spoke in detail with three to four companies.

━━ Among those options, what led you to ultimately choose BOTCHAN?

Kinjō: There are two major points. The first is how easy BOTCHAN is to use. You could also describe it as the UX (user experience).

The ease of use of the admin panel and things like editing scenarios within the chatbot, for example. All of that was extremely simple.

Example of an administration screen *Values shown differ from Seerah Inc.’s actual figures.

━━ Thank you very much.

Kinjō: And the second point is how exceptionally thorough your customer success team’s support is.

This time, BOTCHAN was accepting registrations for a free consultation, and we needed to embed a calendar for booking. They were able to handle this kind of slightly complex request as well.

BOTCHAN startup status

Kinjō: As I mentioned briefly earlier, I personally have a variety of other tasks I need to handle, so it’s a great help that the Customer Success team is covering such a wide range of responsibilities.

━━ Hearing you say that makes this role in Customer Success truly worthwhile.

With a three-person team and a budget more than five times larger, what will Sheila Inc.’s marketing strategy look like going forward?

━━ After actually implementing BOTCHAN, how do you feel about the results?

Kinjō: In terms of cost-effectiveness, it makes sense. Among the customers who contacted us via BOTCHAN, a certain number have actually led to signed contracts, so the results are above our target.

━━ We are very pleased that you have been able to feel the effects. Finally, could you tell us about your company’s future marketing outlook and what you expect from BOTCHAN within that context?

Kinjō: When I first joined the company, I was the only person in the marketing department. Now, however, we have one new graduate who has joined us, and we have also introduced Salesforce (a sales support system) in-house, with one person in charge of everything from its administration to system development. So in total, we now operate as a three-person team.

Kaneshiro: The service site I had been working on in between other tasks has finally reached a point, after more than a year, where I can see it through to completion.

Since our marketing budget has grown to more than five times what it was when I joined the company, I’m thinking of actively publishing more of our own content on that service site and similar channels going forward.

━━ Oh, that sounds really exciting.

Kinjō: I believe the real strength of BOTCHAN is that the more touchpoints we create for it, the more ways we can leverage it and the better we can prevent missed conversions. Going forward, I’d like to implement BOTCHAN on our service site as well and experiment with new ways to utilize it.

━━ I very much hope to continue contributing to your business in a variety of ways. Thank you for taking the time for this interview today.

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If you are considering implementing BOTCHAN and would like concrete advice tailored to your company’s potential use cases and current situation, please feel free to contact us.

One of our consultants will assist you.