Author Archives: Cindy Penders

The tale of the Dutch bookstore, the pivot and the Golden Pin

Bookstore Dominicanen can be found in a former Dominican church in the city of Maastricht, a thriving cultural hub and one of the oldest cities in The Netherlands. Before COVID, the bookstore welcomed almost one million visitors a year. They mostly relied on customers visiting in person to shop for a good read or to enjoy a coffee while admiring the store’s vault paintings and the unique 14th century fresco depicting scenes from Thomas Aquinas’ life. And then the pandemic hit.


The Covid-19 pandemic has had a major impact on businesses worldwide but it also sparked creativity and accelerated many businesses' use of digital tools. In The Netherlands for example, 81% of Dutch SMEs made more use of digital tools to stay in touch with their customers during the lockdown and inform them about changes in their services. 


Dominicanen was one such business to respond to the continuously changing circumstances, something that was recognised by Google with the awarding of the Golden Pin Award.


What are the Golden Pin Awards?


In summer 2021, the Google Netherlands team awarded Golden Pin Awards to twelve inspiring entrepreneurs across the country who managed to continue their services during the pandemic with creativity and the smart use of digital resources whilst receiving high user reviews on their Business Profiles on Google Maps and Search. The list of winners was diverse: from agame store to aknife sharpener, and from a fair fashion clothing shop to a brewery cafe. 

The winners all demonstrated creativity in continuing to offer their services both online and offline, ranging from pop up drive-through restaurants to online tastings and fitting sessions for women’s clothing on YouTube.

Bookshop owner Ton Harmes stands in front of bookcases holding his Golden Pin trophy from Google

Bookstore owner Ton Harmes with his Golden Pin

How did Bookstore Dominicanen pivot?


For the owner, Ton Harmes, the key was perseverance. With the store having to close during the busiest weeks of the year - right in the middle of the holiday season - they had to adapt to survive. Their staff and volunteers immediately started delivering books by foot, bicycle and car. They also set up a takeout counter (offering click and collect online) and when numbers of visitors were limited, they decided to launch a pop-up store: Do(mini)canen.


Online, they invested heavily in their visibility on Google and in their social channels to keep in touch with their customers. Prioritising keeping their Business Profile on Google Maps and Search up to date, they were always able to indicate the changes in shopping times and services. Every change was immediately visible for their customers. They also started streaming book presentations and interviews with writers live on YouTube and communicated a lot more through all social media to keep customers informed.


Ton is convinced that the internet will continue to play a role in their business operations now they have reopened. Speaking to The Keyword he said, ‘We realized that with a million visitors a year, it seems like you don't really need these ‘modern developments’. But when we closed it was suddenly dead quiet in the store. Then we realized how vulnerable we are if we rely solely on in-person customers and that we have to develop our digital channels faster. We now see online, even after corona, playing an increasingly important role in our contacts with customers - for both engagement and actually finding us. Our YouTube channel has received a boost and we keep reaching out to customers through our social channels. The crisis has really caused a change in our mindset.’


The Golden Pin Award has been given a special place in the store and serves as a reminder for the perseverance and pivoting that had to be done. Their ability to continue to conduct business through the worst of it is down to what Ton refers to as ‘Haw Pin’: Hold on.

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Ask a Techspert: How do you build a chatbot?

Chatbots have become a normal part of daily life, from that helpful customer service pop-up on a website to the voice-controlled system in your home. As a conversational AI engineer at Google, Lee Boonstra knows everything about chatbots. When the pandemic started, many of the conferences she spoke at were canceled, which gave Lee the time to put her knowledge into book form. She started writing while she was pregnant, and now, along with her daughter Rebel, she has this book: The Definitive Guide to Conversational AI With Dialogflow and Google Cloud. 


Lee, who lives and works in Amsterdam, is donating the proceeds of her royalties to Stichting Meer dan Gewenst, a nonprofit organization that helps people in the LGBTQ+ community who want to have children. The charity is close to her heart; as an LGBTQ+ parent herself, she wants others like her to have a chance at the joy she feels with her daughter. 


The book itself is for anyone interested in using chatbots, from developers to project managers and CEOs. Here she speaks to The Keyword about the art (and science) behind building a chatbot. 


What exactly is a chatbot?

A chatbot is a piece of software designed to simulate online conversations with people. Many people know chatbots as a chat window that appears when you open a website, but there are more forms — for instance, there are chatbots that answer questions via social media, and the voice of the Google Assistant is a chatbot. Chatbots have been around since the early computing days, but computers, they’ve only recently become more mainstream. That has everything to do with machine learning and natural language understanding. 

Old-school chatbots required you to formulate your sentences carefully. If you said things differently, the chatbot wouldn't know how to answer. If you made a spelling mistake, the bot would run amok! But there are many different ways to say something. A chatbot built with natural language understanding can understand a specific piece of text and then retrieve a specific answer to your question. It doesn't matter if you spell it wrong or say things differently. 


What benefits can the use of chatbots offer companies?
A chatbot works quickly, knows (almost) everything and is available 24/7. That basically makes it the ideal customer service representative. The customer no longer has to wait, the company saves money and the employees experience less stress. As a customer, you get a chatbot on the phone that listens to your question and can answer like a human thanks to speech technology. This way, most customers already receive the answers they need. If the chatbot doesn’t know the answer, it can transfer them to an employee. The customer will not be prompted for information again, as the agent will see that the chat history and system fields are already filled.


Companies are finding more and more ways to use chatbots. For example, since the advent of artificial intelligence, KLM Royal Dutch Airlines has been handling twice as many questions from customers via social media. And technical developer Doop built a Google Assistant Action in the Netherlands in collaboration with AVROTROS, specifically for the Eurovision Song Contest. Anyone who asks for information about the Eurovision Song Contest will hear a chatbot with the voice of presenter Cornald Maas talk about the show. 


How do you build a chatbot?
You can build a chatbot using the Dialogflow tool and other services on the Google Cloud platform. Dialogflow is a tool in your web browser that allows you to build chatbots by entering examples. For example, if you already have a FAQ section on your website, that's a good start. With Dialogflow you can edit the content of that Q&A and then train the chatbot to find answers to questions that customers often ask. Dialogflow learns from all the conversation examples so that it can provide answers.


But just like building a website, you probably need more resources, such as a place to host your chatbot and a database to store your data. You may also want to use additional machine learning models so that your chatbot can do things like detect the content of a PDF or the sentiment of a text. Google Cloud has more than 200 products available for this. It's just like playing with blocks: by stacking all these resources on top of each other, you build a product and you improve the experience, for yourself and for the customer.


Do you have any tips for getting started?
First things first: Start building the chatbot as soon as possible. Many people dread this, because they think it's hugely complex, but it’s better to just get going. You will need to keep track of the conversations and keep an eye on the statistics; what do customers ask and what do they expect? Building a chatbot is an ongoing project. The longer a chatbot lasts, the more data is collected and the smarter and faster it becomes. 


In addition, don't build a chatbot just for one specific channel. What you don't want is to have to build a chatbot for another channel next year and replicate the work. In a large company, teams often want to build a chatbot, but different chat channels are important to different departments. As a company you want to be present on all of those channels, whether that’s the website, on social media, via telephone or on Whatsapp. Build an integrated bot so there’s no duplication of work and maintenance is much easier. 


How do chatbots make life easier for people?
Many of the frustrations that you experience with traditional customer services, such as limited opening hours for contact by phone, waiting times and incomprehensible menus, can be removed with chatbots. People do find it important to know whether they are interacting with a human being or a chatbot, but, interestingly, a chatbot is more likely to be forgiven for making a mistake than a human. People might also have a specific preference for human interaction or a chatbot when discussing more sensitive topics like medical or financial issues, either because they want to have personal, human contact or they would rather not discuss a topic with a human being because they don’t feel comfortable doing so. Chatbots are getting better and better at understanding and interacting, and can be very helpful for interactions about these topics as well.