Infobip, a global cloud communication company for businesses and a leader in omnichannel customer engagement, last week at this year’s CIO Africa Golf Day, launched a virtual WhatsApp-based golf bot named “Rafiki” – which means “friend” in Swahili.
At the event held at the Royal Nairobi Golf Club situated in Nairobi, Kenya, which attracted a multitude of CEOs, CIOs and heads of IT from across the East African region, the virtual WhatsApp-based golf bot was used for a variety of functions, including the registration of attendees for the golf day.
Explaining the rationale behind the golf bot, Andrew Egan, Sales Director at Infobip Africa, noted that the golf bot presents Infobip with the opportunity to showcase the platform’s ability to elevate the customer experience by enhancing the golfer experience through digital communication.
He said through a series of WhatsApp menus, the bot can deliver relevant information to and from specific participants, such as tee times, scores input capability, rules of the game, available facilities at the golf club, meal plan for the day and basically all information that is pertinent to golf players delivered in a structured format by the event organisers.
“While the channel itself provides convenience, the data insight it gathers from how the customer chooses to engage is where the value is as it provides actionable insight for the brands offering it,” he stated.
According to Egan, the golf bot will provide just a flavour of what Infobip can do for organisations, adding that chat bots are all about providing better services at a lower cost. This obviously brings many benefits to organisations by driving efficiencies and breaking the lines dependency of servicing clients by adding more costly resources. Let’s service better and engage better by consuming the right data for the appropriate outcome.
Also making comments about the sponsorship of this year’s CIO Africa Golf Day, the Infobip Sales Director for Africa said: “Ultimately, we want to emphasise our commitment to the region – we are here to add value, bring value and enable our clients to execute their customer experience (CX) strategy. We want the market to understand that we are here to engage, listen and understand what value we can bring to different organisations. We enable this by ensuring your customer experience and customer engagement channels, drive a competitive advantage for your promise to your client within your challenging marketplace.”
The aim of the event is to facilitate networking during a reputable industry golf challenge, in line with the theme of “Connecting with the New Generation. Having previously hosted the ICT Enterprise Community of Golfers in exciting golf challenges in previous years, CIO Africa leverages this opportunity to bring a whole new golfing experience to participants through technology.