In a recent survey, 84 percent of respondents researched gifts online, but more than 25 percent said that this was just as stressful as going into the shops. LEGO also reviewed gifting across the peak holiday period and discovered that customers were overloaded with choice. They also feared failing to give a gift that a child would like. We needed a solution that offered help and would be as individual as the customers.

Parents and gift givers who were looking to buy presents were on Facebook, so we decided a Facebook Messenger chatbot would give the required interactivity to pick out the right gift.

However, we knew that a bot on its own would not be enough to bring people into the LEGO experience, so we didn’t just build a chatbot; we built Ralph, a lovable robot with heaps of personality and one purpose: To help you find the perfect present, making users a gifting champion!

Ralph’s tone of voice, based on LEGO Movie characters, helped him stand out from other chatbots. We used warm, inviting language to make the stressful shopping experience seem carefree, fun and informed and further brought Ralph to life using playful GIFs and emojis.

Throughout the process, we recognized that not every customer wants the same journey with Ralph. Some seek a gift suggestion as quickly as possible and others prefer a deeper dive into the LEGO world. Using our audience mindsets, we created multiple entry points and behaviors for Ralph to address different customer requirements. To make sure every gift suggestion was perfect, we developed questions around price range, age, personality and interests. We then recategorized all the LEGO sets, assigning them to the new personality and interests categories. This guaranteed that relevant suggestions would suit the customer’s price point, child’s age, interests and personalities. We also developed a custom API that provided real time, localized stock updates from store.LEGO.com, and gave customers a unique free shipping code and gift. When customers were happy with their choice, a single tap would take them through to checkout at store.LEGO.com.

In three weeks, Ralph was rolled out across the United Kingdom, United States, Canada, Germany, France and Poland.  We also promoted Ralph across Facebook with paid media, specifically targeting our customer mindsets with relevant messaging that spoke directly to their needs.