Acobot Captures Thousands of Leads for Skyfi Labs

Since 2012, roughly 250,000 college students across 35 countries have benefited from the practical skills and project-based classes that Skyfi Education Labs provides. The company, based in India, offers both online and classroom programs and workshops covering a number of highly technical subjects, including machine learning, robotics, electrical engineering, and the Internet of Things.

Skyfi Labs offers both free and paid courses, and earlier this year, it noticed that its conversions were far lower than industry norms. A disproportionate number of students went to its website for free courses and left without purchasing additional resources or signing up for paid training.

To address the issue, Skyfi Labs added live chat to its website to capture sales leads that it hoped could be converted into paying customers. Though it did see a slight bump in the number of conversions generated, the solution came at a high price, which was not being offset by the sales increase.

Since that solution proved not to be very cost-effective, Skyfi Labs kept looking and eventually came across Acobot, which is based in Sunnyvale, Calif. Acobot designs voice-enabled virtual shopping assistants for online e-commerce stores. Its virtual assistants, which appear as pop-up widgets, can help customers find the products they need, answer their questions, and guide them through to checkout. The chatbots can also be trained for cross-selling, upselling, product recommendations, couponing, and more.

Each time Acobot has captured a sales lead, it sends a real-time notification via email.

It took Skyfi Labs just 10 minutes to set up its own Acobot virtual assistant. Almost immediately, the sales leads started pouring into the company’s email inbox.

“We all knew live chat was the most efficient conversion tool,” said Pavan Ponnaganti, founder and CEO of Skyfi Labs, in a statement. “We never expected that a chatbot could capture more sales leads than a human, but Acobot surprised us.”

In just five months, Acobot’s virtual assistant was engaged in 102,518 sessions on Skyfi Labs’ website (www.skyfilabs.com). Out of those, it generated 19,151 sales leads and achieved a conversation rate of 18.7 percent, allowing Skyfi to successfully turn twice as many website visitors into sales leads and then into paying customers.

After optimizing the settings and further training the Acobot virtual assistant to answer frequently asked questions, Skyfi Labs doubled the volume of sales leads without increasing the volume of traffic on its website. The virtual assistant has achieved a higher lead conversion rate and generated far more sales leads from the same website traffic than its previous live chat offering.

According to Ponnaganti, the Acobot virtual assistant continues to bring in more than 100 viable sales leads every day.

Acobot’s integration options and professional services teams helped Skyfi Labs integrate the virtual assistant with its business processes seamlessly. As its email inbox is filled with leads, Skyfi Labs uses Acobot’s built-in lead callback feature to deliver leads directly into its CRM systems and other back-office applications, streamlining the sales process and improving the efficiency of its sales team.

Acobot’s technology uses artificial intelligence to learn autonomously from the websites where it appears. In addition to chatbots for e-commerce sales and lead generation, Acobot makes chatbots for customer service as well.

“Skyfi Labs is an innovative e-learning provider,” Ponnaganti points out. “We’re open to new technologies and always testing new tools to grow our business. We’ve become a loyal customer of Acobot because it is an easy-to-use yet efficient tool for lead generation.” 

The Payoff

In just the first five months after deploying an Acobot virtual assistant on its website, Skyfi Education Labs saw the following results:

• 102,518 online chat sessions;
• 19,151 sales leads;
• an 18.7 percent conversion rate; and
• two times as many website visitors turned into sales leads and paying customers.