Minato achieves an 2X increase in revenues & reduced 80% of their with CraftChat.

Read how CraftChat bot automated leads acquisition and process workflow for Minato Immigration Law Office. With no-code, an easy-to-use software client was able to automate leads responses, information gathering, and customer workflows.

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Administrative And International Legal Office

We spoke with Mr. Tanamura, representative of the Administrative Secretary and International Legal Office, who specializes in legal procedures related to the status of residence of foreigners residing in Japan, as well as so-called "visa applications", about the problem solved and experience of working with CraftChat.

CraftChat help automate presales and support activities 

------ Please share what Minato Immigration Law Office does?

We specialize in legal services for people trying to move to Japan with their visa applications and other similar services. We have multiple teams which help people with their visa applications and other related queries and services. 

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------ Main challenges before working with CraftChat?

Our employees responsible for pre-sales and customer support suddenly left the company and we were stuck with a large backlog of inquiries. We were receiving new inquiries with a limited staff to cater and it was proving difficult to respond in a timely and accurate manner.  That’s when we started looking for a chatbot that could automate pre-sales and customer support.

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------ Why did you decide to deploy a chatbot that can automate customer interaction?

In fact, even before we set up our Facebook page, we had considered deploying a chatbot and we thought of various scenarios to build around customer interactions. However, at that time, we had a notion that people should be in charge of customer service especially in the office related to legal aspects, and we hired staff who could understand Japanese and foreign languages.

Our Facebook page, Minato Immigration Law Office https://www.facebook.com/visa.minato/, ranks #1 in SEO for certain keywords such as "Japan Visa Support", and has gained around 18,000+ followers. Which gives us a lot of traffic & queries from around the world. 

In order to have timely responses, our staff was working from their phones and at very late hours of the day and some days till midnight. As customers come from various time zones. This was becoming a bit of an inconvenience and problematic for our staff. After a few people, whom we trained in pre-sales and support roles quit, we wanted to introduce an automated solution for this problem to help our clients & employees.

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------ Reasons for choosing CraftChat among the many chatbot vendors?

The most important thing was the ease of use and I could use the dashboard on my own. I did contact several different chatbot vendors and asked for a demo, but my main focus was to build comprehensive workflows for our process which was not possible in some of them. In the chatbot, we wanted to deploy,  we were mainly looking for help in terms of the technology and flexibility to implement our own scenarios. We also appreciated the help pages and quick responses from the CraftChat support team. 

Reduce labor costs by 80% and double the sales! 3X increase in our lead conversion after the chatbot.

---- How was your experience working with CraftChat?

First and foremost our sales doubled after the chatbot was deployed. This was a big impact, and this also indicated how we have lost revenues in the past due to delayed responses or unhelpful replies. CraftChat is always available and always accurate. 

Pre CraftChat deployment, our pre-sales and customer services were managed by two people. However, we were running into the problems of delayed responses and inaccurate data. After the deployment of our bot, we were able to cut manual labor costs by 80%.

After I was able to reduce the workload and automated the non-core part of my business, it was an opportunity for me to focus on management. Until now, our focus was mainly on just quickly replying to as many of our customers, but after the introduction of CraftChat, the quality of responses has been standardized, which also helps us with more predictable incoming applications each day. This allows us to plan our recruitment for growth. We are also now able to handle twice as many projects as before with fewer resources. 

Since our chatbot is always available to our customers for their requests for information and to provide updates, I can now focus solely on management, allowing me to add more value to my business and look ahead to grow further.

---- Has there been any change in the incoming application rates and closing of these inquiries?

Yes, as we have received lots of new incoming leads/inquiries, our incoming requests rate has increased threefold.

Most times customers start with simple questions. Earlier in some cases, these questions could not be answered if we didn’t have an expert available at that time. There were some cases where the staff could not reply to a lead in time. Moreover, in certain cases, we lost a lot of time responding to cold leads where things would not go any further business-wise but this did take away big chunk of time away from our potential customers and potential customers.  

As our process earlier was manual and we had a huge backlog of requests with the leads expecting quick responses. All this resulted in human errors and inaccurate information which lead to unsatisfied customers and leads. With the introduction of CraftChat, we have designed the workflows from the customer's point of view, so we believe that we were able to respond to a lot of questions without any human intervention. Two scenarios that come to mind right now are for potential leads and hot leads. These upfront workflows have helped us convert much better and we can focus our efforts in the right direction. With potential leads, we give them a lot of information upfront to let them make a decision, this used to be a manual process that took a lot of time and energy earlier. As for the hot leads, we have divided the workflows and scenarios based on earlier interactions. Overall our response rates and accuracy have improved drastically.

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----- How was it working with CraftChat Dashboard and Did you face any issues?

There was no issue in particular. From the time we saw the demo, I felt that it was "an easy-to-use /learn  UI", and we were able to work on it ourselves. Help pages and customer support were excellent. We also like the way there are some templates available for certain workflows which we only had to edit before start using.

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---- Features of CraftChat that you like and use regularly?

We really take advantage of the analysis feature to improve our customer interactions and tweak the workflows.  We can check  "how many chat messages are high on which day" and "which messages users are dropping at", which is useful for daily improvement. We have also identified new issues such as few inquiries from repeat leads (customers). All this and more also helps us to make the sales forecasts.

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----- What are your future plans in automating more business workflows?

I would like to provide even more existing services online so that I can reach an even larger customer base and improve the existing inefficiencies in our process. 

For example, In a scenario customer has to physically send us tax certificates to our office, and after which documents were created based on the tax certificate. Then we also have to return the same document back. The key issues as you can imagine are the constant follow-up and mismatched priorities and in the end, the staff still have to send the document back. So instead of automated notifications and calendar integrations, we were working with manual notes and self-managed calendars. We can solve all things by asking customers to provide the same information by reply to the messenger chat and we can prepare documents based on that. We right now manually respond to and manage this communication on LINE Messenger. We think this and scenarios like this can be automated using chatbots. In addition, we are thinking about renovating the website by the end of the year, and after the renovation, we would like to deploy a chatbot on the website and accept even more customer applications.

----- Any Final Words?

The staff in charge of presales and customer service before the introduction of CraftChat was a key part of the company. Their resignation at that time was a very big problem for us, but I was able to turn that setback into an opportunity by the transition from manual processes to using the software. The whole experience was itself was simple, basically performed by me, and I was not even familiar with the technology.

In the immigration and visa-related matters, there is usually a culture of expecting face-to-face interaction, even for the smallest of things, which was also a load to customers, and technology was not utilized properly before we started using CraftChat. However, after seeing the benefits first hand, we are moving more and more interactions online with our customers.  Originally, we were forced to do things by hand due to our industry culture, but now we have changed our perspective to embrace automation and expand our business on automation. 

We would like to continue our efforts to further improve operational efficiency using technology, to become the best place in Japan to get help with your Visa.

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