MiniBot - A.I. ChatBot in a WeChat Mini Program

Increase Customer Conversion, Decrease Customer Frustration

Feb 2, 2018

Over the past two years, Rikai Labs has demonstrated through its various chatbots for the Ask Jerry Account, Budweiser, Mead Johnson and our own English language TeacherBot that chatbots can be very effective at engaging, educating, supporting and ultimately converting users in WeChat official accounts. Among other things our chatbots were able to achieve:

  • 80% conversation completion rate
  • 375 users for one agent
  • 200% increase sales
  • 522% increase in conversion to V.I.P. membership

Limitations of WeChat Official Accounts

And yet, the interface on the Official WeChat accounts severely limits user ability to have a rich chat experience. During our development of our existing chatbots, we’ve found that in order to provide a rich and fulfilling user experience in the Official Account, we’ve had to repurpose existing Official Account functionality for different needs.



Making choices with Images and the Menu bar.

These “innovations” allowed us to build, scalable, intuitive chat experiences for users within the UI limitations of the WeChat Official Accounts. These hacks gave us access to the first version of chat interfaces for WeChat users. But for our users, we wanted to provide an even more polished, rich chat experience.

In addition to the limitations of the user interface, Official Accounts also have many limitations as marketing tools in terms of building viral social campaigns. At Rikai Labs, we always included a “shareable” image that we presented to users and encouraged them to share.


Shareable image with an embedded QR code


While these images proved effective and had share rates as high as 14%, it was difficult to track deep analytics in a scalable business friendly way.


The Rise of Mini Programs

This development environment allows companies and brands the flexibility to customize their own user interfaces. Companies can build experiences that look and feel like traditional apps (Mobike, JD.com), H5 campaigns, games or even chat interfaces.


### *Courtesy of LeWagon*

In order to encourage the development of WeChat Mini Programs, Tencent has also unlocked several sharing functionalities that allows users to not only share “pages” of the mini program into WeChat groups, but also allows companies to begin to understand where and when these pages get shared.

Lastly, Mini Programs have the benefit of being able to live as relatively stand alone applications that do not require complicated and messy integration into the Official WeChat account.


MiniBot - Marrying ChatBots and Mini Programs

At Rikai Labs we have developed a chatbot Mini Program framework that provides the U.I. flexibility and sharing ability of Mini Programs with the power of our A.I. powered chatbot platform.



The result is a rich chat interface that allows users to have engaging, intuitive interactions with the Mini Program while also giving users the ability to type out free text. This free text can then be processed by Rikai Labs Artificial Intelligence engine. This processing gives companies the ability to understand a users intentions in its most elemental form - the users' own words.


Who should use MiniBot?

Currently, Rikai Labs minibot platform has fit the needs of customers with three specific types of problems.

  1. Companies interested in converting their users based upon a recommendation. (RecommendationBot).
  2. Brands interested answering product questions in a simple scalable way. (FAQBot).
  3. Companies interested learning more about their users want. (SurveyBot)