Turning Web Surveys into Conversations
It’s been a year since Chris Messina wrote his famous treatise declaring 2016 the year of conversational commerce.
Indeed, we saw lots of awesome developments in messaging, bots and conversational commerce in 2016:
- Facebook launched an updated Messenger platform that opened the service to developers everywhere.
- LINE, Viber, Twitter and many other messaging apps have opened up their platforms as well and offered up a variety of rich messaging tools to bots and businesses.
- Google and Amazon both invested heavily and launched high-profile products that bring conversational voice interfaces to everyone
- Tens of thousands of new bots have been built for consumer channels and for the enterprise
As the founder of a messaging startup, I’m thrilled to see so much development, investment and creativity in this space. There really is an opportunity here to rethink how the applications and services we use every day should work in a more fluid, conversational way.
Rolling up my sleeves
For this year’s Smooch hackathon, an internal event where our entire 33 person company stops doing their regular jobs and instead spends 2 days working on any problem they choose, I decided to team up with my colleague Lucie to design a new approach to web forms and surveys.
If you’re anything like me, you probably fill in web forms dozens of times every week. Many of these forms are confusing, long and just plain ugly. Products like TypeForm have done a lot to make this better, but the experiences are still tied to the web and following up with survey respondents is still really troublesome and difficult.
To solve these problems, Lucie and I built chatform.ai and made it available as an open source project. Chatform lets anyone build a form or survey that they can then distribute over messaging channels like Facebook Messenger, WeChat, Telegram, LINE, Viber and others.
Here’s an example of a form in action, in this case running over Facebook Messenger.
What’s really awesome about these conversational forms is that they feel much more natural than tabbing through fields in a browser.
Best of all, because Chatform is built on Smooch, once someone responds to your survey you can typically follow up with them via Slack, Front, Zendesk or any other business system integrated with Smooch.
We’ve designed Chatform to be easy for just about anyone to use, though we only spent about 20 hours on it so the UI could still use some polish. That said, you can sign up at chatform.ai and give it a whirl to see how conversational forms can work for you.
We’ve also open sourced the project under the MIT license. GitHub has everything you need to be able to deploy your very own instance of Chatform to Heroku or your own server.
Feel free to take Chatform and build something unique of your own from it using the provided source code and the Smooch API, I’d love to see what you build and learn about how well (or poorly!) your conversational surveys are performing.
Happy surveying!
