Chatbot Helps Children Get a Smart Start
Meet SmartStart
SmartStart is a social franchise that started in 2015 to provide quality early learning to children of ages three and four years old. Recognising the importance of the first six years of a child’s life in their development, paired with the lack of early learning provision in South Africa, the company saw the opportunity to provide a pragmatic, affordable solution.
The aim? Changing the future of our country by laying strong early learning foundations for our children.
Playgroups, day mothers and Early Childhood Development (ECD) centres are incorporated into the programme to help improve children’s readiness for learning, school performance and overall life success.
The franchised programme enables men and women to run their own SmartStart programmes within their communities around the country. These franchisees, known as SmartStarters receive comprehensive training and quality approval before starting their own early learning micro enterprises.
More than 37 000 children have already been given a smarter start through the programme, and the company aims to reach one million children every year by 2025.
Once upon a brief…
A lack of digital channels to help with performing daily tasks, such as child registration and accessing the educational resources most frequently needed, led SmartStart to us.
SmartStart knew a chatbot could help and we couldn’t have agreed more.
The chatbot needed to give SmartStarters a digital platform that would make daily tasks quicker and easier.
It sounded like a smart idea to us. And just the job for a chatbot.
The Big 3
While there’s a lot of fun along the way, building a chatbot is serious business that requires meticulous planning, testing and several key considerations to make sure it ticks all the boxes of our clients’ needs.
Through our discussions with SmartStart, we identified three key factors to be taken into consideration when creating the SmartStart chatbot.
● Cost
The platform needed to be low in cost for both the end-user, as well as SmartStart.
● Familiarity
The platform needed to be something that users were already familiar with — rather than requiring them to learn something new — to ensure easy adoption and a great user experience.
● Multi-lingual
With a SmartStarter community that stretches throughout the country, the chatbot needed to cater for all eleven South African languages. This naturally gave us 11 more reasons to get excited.
From web to WhatsApp
The decision to create the chatbot for WhatsApp was unanimous. And, with us launching our new chatbot for WhatsApp at the time, the timing couldn’t have been more perfect. The switch from web to WhatsApp, created the need to redesign user experience elements for the new platform, as well as conforming to the WhatsApp rules and regulations. Having the SmartStart chatbot available on WhatsApp instead of on the website or other social platforms, allowed for all SmartStarters to interact in a familiar way without having to use laptops, larger amounts of data or download a new app.
A chatbot is born
The Feersum Engine team created one smart little chatbot that enables SmartStarters to:
● Register children seamlessly using simple-to-follow points on WhatsApp and with minimal data capturing required.
● Complete attendance registers online with an image taken at the end of the week that will be compliant and available for verification.
● Quick, easy, 24/7 access to educational resources
The result? A solution that allows SmartStarters to focus less time on mundane daily tasks and more time and energy on the more important parts of their work.
And that right there is why we love what we do.
Want to find out more about how we can build a customised chatbot to solve your specific business needs? Reach out to us at chat@feersum.io and let’s chat.
