Business Info - i142

01732 759725 33 magazine Q&A Founded in August 2018, Leadoo is one of the fastest growing companies in Finland where its chatbot platform is being used by 550 companies to engage more directly with website visitors and, in doing so, enhance both sales and recruitment processes. In October it opened a UK office, enabling businesses over here to use its technology and marketing expertise to increase website conversion rates that are typically less than 1%. The company designs, scripts, implements and optimises a variety of bots that go far beyond traditional customer service applications to convert passive website visitors into sales leads or job applications. Leadoo has clients in numerous industries, including recruitment, real estate, leisure, travel and tourism, print, roofing and software.With packages starting at £399 a month, Leadoo recommends companies have at least 1,000 monthly website visitors to make the investment worthwhile, but this is not a hard and fast rule and some clients have as few as 100. James Goulding spoke to Leadoo founder Mikael da Costa to find out more about the company, its technology and its applications. Business Info: You started Leadoo in August 2018 with one other person and you now employ 40 marketing, technology and sales professionals in Helsinki, Stockholm and London. What inspired you to set up the company? Mikael da Costa: I was working in recruitment marketing before Leadoo and had the feeling that companies that spent money on employer branding to get better applicants were not getting any more, or any better, applicants than those that didn’t. The company where I worked ran the career sites of 120 medium-sized businesses in Finland and we found out that the average conversion rate from someone reading an employer branding Q&A article to submitting an actual job application was less than 0.2%. I started analysing why the conversion rate was so low and found that while articles explaining why people enjoy working at a certain company might be easy to read, to take it to the next stage the reader would have to click the job vacancies tab, find an open position, be convinced that they wanted to apply and then deliver an application and probably update their CV. There are lots of opportunities in such a process for the user to jump off. Before starting Leadoo we created an interactive employer branding article for a company in Finland and were able to raise the conversion rate to 17%. That’s a huge increase – one out of five people started discussing with our bot and were converted. We thought at first that Leadoo would be a niche recruitment solution, but quickly understood that what was happening with employer advertising also happens with content advertising. Most companies put out great articles listing five reasons why you should buy a certain product, but then the article ends and the user has to scroll back up and click on ‘contact us’ to take it further. Instead of you as a company being active and going after a client, you put the onus on site visitors to contact you, which, from my point of view, is insane. Business Info: There are a lot of chatbots out there, how do yours differ from what’s already available? Mikael da Costa: To date, chatbots have mainly been used for customer service purposes, to automate customer service behaviour. Leadoo is different because while 20% of our business comes from the customer service sector, 80% of what we do comes from lead generation. With Leadoo, we have chatbots, which account for 20%-25% of our business, but also deeper, more interactive modules that companies can use on their websites – a modal bot, an innovate bot, a call back widget. Compared to a chatbot provider, Leadoo is more of a lead generation platform with various modules that make a company’s website more engaging and more interactive for visitors. In 2014 or 2015, Arianna Huffington was in Finland speaking at a business forum where she was asked what made Huffington Post so different from struggling traditional media companies. She said that the biggest issue traditional media companies had was that they hadn’t yet realised that Leadoo is more of a lead generation platform with various modules that make a company’s website more engaging and more interactive for visitors Continued... Business Info talks to Mikael da Costa, founder of Finnish lead generation company Leadoo, about how the company’s platform takes chatbots to the next level Mikael da Costa