Introducing Your Personal Assistant, "Booth Buddy"

April 01, 2009

We're pleased to announce the release of a new feature we've been working on to foster greater camaraderie between buyer and seller: "Booth Buddy" (which I always seem to mistype as "Boody Buddy," but that's another story). The premise of Booth Buddy is simple: when you're too busy to personally welcome guests to your booth, Booth Buddy will take care of it for you, while you tend to your "important human things."

To make the Booth Buddy service feel more familiar, we've created a human embodiment named "Bizzy." To put Bizzy on the job, a seller merely needs to visit their booth chat and type the word "on." Upon issuing this command, Bizzy will swoop into your booth and start entertaining your booth guests. If you need Bizzy to be quiet, simply type "off" and she'll be gone.

Can Bizzy make you less busy? Hopefully! But if not, she can always fall
back on that friendly smile.

How does she do it?

We have created an artificial intelligence for Bizzy that helps her to sense what your booth guests want to talk about. Based on your visitors' grammatical cues, she'll attempt to shoot the breeze with them. While there are government projects that have spent millions of dollars on perfecting a convincing artificial intelligence system, we've trained Bizzy to work "good enough" by steering conversation toward her strong suit: joke telling. We've already taught Bizzy several of the funnier jokes on the Internet, and we plan to continue to add jokes to her repertoire in the weeks to come.

Bizzy Makes Busy People Less Busy

We don't expect Bizzy to be able to completely replace natural human interactions at Bonanzle, but we think you'll find her to be a handy backup when you can't be around your computer for whatever reason. We all know that "trust" is the key to driving sales, and studies have repeatedly shown that there are few better paths to establish trust than through the exchange of humor. But being funny can be hard work: you have to remember jokes and hone your delivery. With Bizzy, the hard work is done for you. After Bizzy has "warmed up" your buyers with her sense of humor, your buyers are more apt to feel at ease. This puts you in position to enter the conversation and close more potential sale.

While a project like Booth Buddy is an ambitious one, we think that it represents a great opportunity for our sellers to increase conversions by automating the difficult process of building trust during your interaction, while leaving you to do what you do best: provide a memorable service experience and a great deal.

If you know of any good (clean) jokes you think should be added to Booth Buddy's collection, feel free to add them below.