Overview
Hello Promo sells promotional products through an e-commerce website. With a small team, they needed a way to handle customer questions and guide shoppers to the right products without relying on someone being available to chat.
PromoPilot built a Zobot on Zoho SalesIQ that handles three jobs: answering general support questions, creating Zoho Desk tickets when issues need follow-up, and acting as a shopping assistant that pulls live product data from Liftoff Commerce and returns results with images, pricing, and direct product links. AI runs throughout the bot to interpret what customers are asking and decide how to respond.
Key outcomes:
Customers get support at any hour without the team monitoring chat Shoppers can ask natural-language questions about products and get back a visual carousel with images, pricing, and links Support issues that need human follow-up automatically become Zoho Desk tickets
Executive Summary
Hello Promo is a small promotional products company based in Columbus, Ohio, with a team of three to four people. They sell through an e-commerce website, which means their customers are browsing and buying without a salesperson nearby to help them find what they're looking for or answer questions.
“At Hello Promo, we’ve always been very high-touch with our clients, but as our company store business has grown, so have our clients’ expectations around technology and the user experience. We’re a small team, so I wanted to find a way to make it easier for users to get answers quickly while still delivering the level of service we’re known for.” – Stephanie Taylor, Co-Founder
Problem Statement and Key Challenges
A small e-commerce team can't staff a live chat window around the clock, but customers still expect quick answers. Hello Promo needed to support shoppers at any hour without adding headcount.
A few specific things had to work:
Customers needed to ask product questions in plain language and get useful answers back, not just a link to a search page. Common support questions needed handling without pulling someone in for every conversation. When something did require follow-up, it needed to become a real support ticket, not disappear into a chat log.
“For me, this wasn’t just about reducing support requests. I wanted to create an experience that felt innovative and differentiated us from other distributors. The bot helps users navigate the store, answers common questions and gives them a clear path to our team when they need more help. It makes the entire experience feel smarter and more seamless, while allowing our team to focus on the things that really do need a human touch.” – Stephanie Taylor, Co-Founder
Evaluation of the Problem
PromoPilot looked at what Zoho SalesIQ's Zobot platform could do against what Hello Promo actually needed. The shopping assistant was the trickiest piece: the bot had to understand a customer's intent from a freeform question, call the product catalog API, and return results in a format that works on a website, with images, prices, and clickable links.
Zoho SalesIQ had the AI capabilities and API integration flexibility to make that work. Zoho Desk was already part of Hello Promo's setup, so connecting ticket creation to the bot's escalation path was straightforward.
Proposed Solution
PromoPilot built a Zobot on Zoho SalesIQ with three conversation modes:
Shopping assistance: a customer can ask something like "What shirts come in green and extra large?" and the bot calls the product catalog API, then responds with a visual carousel showing matching products, their images, pricing, and a direct link to each product page. General support: the bot handles common questions about orders, shipping, and other topics without needing to hand off to a person. Escalation: when a question is outside what the bot can resolve, it creates a Zoho Desk ticket automatically so nothing gets lost.
AI runs throughout: determining which path to take, deciding when to call external APIs, and shaping responses to feel conversational rather than scripted.
Implementation
The build took about a month. Most of that wasn't plumbing the integrations but tuning the prompts: getting the AI to reliably read customer questions, route them to the right path, and respond in a way that felt natural. Shopping queries took the most iteration, since customers phrase questions about sizes, colors, and availability in a lot of different ways.
The product catalog API integration and Zoho Desk ticket creation were built alongside the prompt work and tested against real customer scenarios before going live.
Results
Hello Promo now has a bot fielding customer conversations at any hour. Shoppers get product recommendations with images and links in response to plain-English questions. Support questions are answered or escalated without anyone watching a chat window to make it happen.
