All About the Navu Sidebar

The new sidebar is Navu’s solution to a growing problem for marketing teams:  stories are getting bigger and more complicated while attention spans are getting smaller.  The Sidebar is Navu’s way of introducing conversation into your website in a way that visitors will appreciate. They don’t want to wander through hundreds of web pages. They have questions and want no-nonsense answers. The companies that help potential customers the most in getting those answers will be the winners.

We have designed the sidebar to be co-equal with the content on your website. This contrasts with chatbots that feel like they are “bolted on” to a website — and used either at the end of a process or as a last resort. A sidebar sits right beside your content and is available to the visitor as needs arise. Depending on what the visitor is trying to do, they may start with content and use the conversation for clarification. Or they may start with conversation and use it to get to supporting content they want. 

This is why we designed this to be a sidebar, not an overlay. You don’t want to ask visitors to keep opening and closing a bot when they have a question. As a sidebar, it doesn’t get in the way of your content, and your content doesn’t get in the way of conversation.

Conversations for all occasions

So who is the visitor conversing with? The sidebar enables three kinds of conversation. 

First, visitors are learning that well-trained AIs are, in many way, better conversationalists than people — insofar as they can be thoroughly trained, are very patient, and have no ulterior motives. So the Sidebar starts with our interactive AI guide that is trained on all of your website content. 

Second, visitors may have needs that go beyond the website content and they need to chat with a human representative. The sidebar has a Contact tab where visitors can chat with company representatives if they are available. 

Finally, the visitor may have a question or comment that they want to leave for the company, expecting no response or a delayed response via email. So the Sidebar also supports leaving messages.

Much more than a chatbot

Let’s talk a little more about this AI guide. Is this a chatbot? Well, yes, that’s part of it. A chatbot can respond to questions and the guide can certainly do that. But the guide goes further. The guide is not only trained on the content from the website. It also learns about each visitor based on where they come from, which content they consume, and what questions they ask. This profile is used to provide better responses and suggestions for the visitor. For example, when asked for a case study, a guide might recognize that out of all the case studies on the site, it can find one that is the best fit for that particular visitor. The guide can also be proactive. For example, each time a visitor navigates to a new web page, the guide will offer a TL;DR card that concisely summarizes the content on that new page. 

Coming back to training, it’s worth nothing that Navu automatically trains the AI guide using the publicly available content on your website. That’s great for you because it means that you have nothing to do beyond your normal work. Just create the best possible website content for each of the audiences that you serve. As you add and change content, Navu automatically retrains the guide accordingly.

It’s easy to go live

What about live chat? How does that work? We like to keep things simple. If the AI guide has done its job, many of the visitor’s questions will have already been answered by the time they want to reach out to speak to a human. When the visitor wants to reach out, we announce this on your internal chat system. That announcement includes a short summary of what we know about the visitor along with links to the full journey and conversation with the interactive guide. Whoever is most appropriate to handle this visitor just replies in a new thread from within the chat system and Navu acts as the intermediary passing these messages back and forth between the chat system and the visitor’s sidebar. Today we support teams using Slack as their chat system and we’ll soon also start supporting Microsoft Teams as well. They will work the same way.

Of course, you won’t always have someone available to chat. Or you might not want to offer live chat to some visitors. Navu has you covered. You can configure the calendar for when chat will be offered. And you can use Navu’s audience segmentation to tell us which audiences should be offered the ability to chat.

The sidebar also has a More tab. This is for miscellaneous things. Today it offers the visitor one simple setting to tell the interactive guide how verbose to be in its response. The default setting will adjust the length of the responses based on the nature of the questions. But visitors can change this to make the answers shorter or longer. In future, we are planning for some other exciting things as visitors start taking more and more advantage of these capabilities.

Let’s review: What’s so great about Sidebar?

1. Visitors will be delighted to be able to serve themselves by getting comprehensive answers to their questions without having to dig through all of your content.
2. The Sidebar is visually integrated into your website and the visitor’s journey. It’s not a bolt-on.
3. The AI guide is trained automatically based on your website content, so you have nothing new added to your busy workload.
4. The sidebar includes the ability to intermediate live chats between selected website visitors who meet your criteria and your sales/support team using your existing internal chat system.
5. You can have a sidebar integrated on your existing website by adding a simple embed code and flipping a switch. No new website redesign work, but if you want to more fully integrate the look-and-feel and styling, it is all under your control.

Frequently Asked Questions