STiR coffee and tea magazine

22 STiR coffee and tea / Issue 6, 2018 (December / January 2019) Tea Report: Peter Keen CANADA Chatbots Boost Tea Sales 35% Chatbots personalize and humanize social media, smartphone apps, and e-commerce sites. They are a conversational interface. At their best, they come close to talking with a knowledgeable human, drawing heavily on advanced AI machine learning and natural language processing. Many small busi- nesses don't consider them in their planning; they seem high tech, high risk, high cost, and intimidating. Dollar Tea Club, a subscription service based in Toronto, Canada, shows that they need to be none of these. All its business is online. It offers artisan teas in small amounts, starting at $1 a month. The blends are creative and unusual, all made with no artificial ingredients and sourced though direct trade with producers. Most of Dollar's "customer touches" are by email. "And the emails don't stop when we go to sleep," says Allan Shulman, c.e.o. Many of the messages cover similar questions, about subscrip- tion plans, delivery times and brewing. The responses were often cut and paste answers from boiler plate text. Shulman initially looked at basic software chatbots but they didn't offer much of an alternative. They were weak at understanding the phrasing and nuances of customer questions and gave limited responses. That's changed. Leaders in AI are packaging their software as the equivalent of mobile apps. Small businesses can quickly develop their own chatbots through structured menus. IBM's Watson Assistant, Dollar's choice, can detect user moods. Facebook's Messenger chatbot platform will pick up that a customer who uses the word "vegan" is sure to be inter- ested in options appealing to vegetarians. There are hundreds of low-cost chatbot development services. They all support major social media apps, including for WhatsApp, SMS, Instagram, Facebook, WordPress, etc. The general estimate of development effort seems to be that a small business can create a robust and useful chatbot in around 30 days. The benefits to Dollar and customers are clear and contribute to building a customer-cen- tric, operationally efficient business: Cost and Chatbots handle 80% of queries onsite time savings: Dollar estimates that 80% of customer enquiries are now answered immediately online and without leaving the site, unlike email. Shulman's statement that this saves him 1-2 hours a day will resonate with any small online provider overloaded and understaffed. Revenue generation: Dollar's conversion rates for enquiries to sales have risen from 3.09% to 4.17%, a 35% increase. Customer engagement: Cus- tomers stay on the Web site longer and get instant replies, making for an interactive conversation rather than a correspondence. CHILE Retailer Profile: Tea Connection Latin America is not marked by strong tea cultures. There are pockets of excellence. Colombia is growing some fine teas. Innovations in herbal teas from the rich plant diversity of the Andes and Amazon are increasing rapidly. Brazil, once a major producer of tea, is rediscovering it. But the more general pattern is limited choices, lack of consumer knowledge and interest, and low consumption per capita. That's why it is such a pleasant surprise to come across a top rate tea house like The Tea Connection in Santiago, the capital of Chile with a population of 7 million. It is dominated by the Andes mountains on its horizon. The Tea Connection is sited on a corner in the busy developing section of the city, Providencia. It provides a pleasant functional ambience, designed for people to eat small dishes and drink tea, properly brewed and served in pots, as it should be. There's a good mix of inventory, including for instance a superior Russian Caravan and a tea that in itself constitutes an index of taste and expertise: a zippy, balanced, and fresh Yunnan gold tips. At a guess, the provider is one of the top German firms that are strong in Latin America. (Imports from the EU are tariff-free.) There is no distinct beverage culture in Chile. Tea consumption is higher than in most of Latin America, around .73 kilos per capita (under one cup a day) versus .21 for Argentina and near zero for Mexico and Peru. The dominant drinks are very sweet sodas – plenty of Coca Cola and even more Bilz and Pap – very fruity, a sort of liquid jello in taste. The coffee is about as low end as the bean could produce: Nestle Instant dominates the national market. Starbucks arrived only in 2003 and by 2010 had 40 stores in 3 cities. The Tea Connection seems a signal of a small but growing interna- tional trend: 1. Locate a tea house in the center of a large city with a strong flow of tourists and a workforce with growing incomes. 2. Use food as an attraction for people who are unfamiliar with tea. 3. Provide a menu of tea choices that cover the main types of flavor and customer interest: some classic black teas, greens targeted to the increasing wellness buyer segment, slightly unusual ones such as a few oolongs but not a barrage of exotic fruit and herbs run wild, and marsala chais – increasingly the international common ground among tea, coffee and herbal lovers. 4. Keep the ambience comfortable, convenient and unobtrusive. It should be invitational and functional not a Las Vegas interior decorator's fantasy. 5. Recognize that the best way to build a reputation for tea is to offer fine classics rather than fads and exotic blends. INDIA Factories Closed for Winter India tea exports are on the rise with gains in both value and volume this year - trends that the Tea Board of India intends preserve by aggressively combatting the typical year-end surge of stale tea. This year, for the first time, the tea board has ordered the mandatory closing of factories beginning Dec. 10 to prevent the processing of stale leaves.

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