Tell us about Lacuna Solution’s journey and what you do?
Bronwyn: “Lacuna Legal Providers launched in 2019 but we diversified to become Lacuna Professional Solutions this year. The business was intended to help lawyers who had ventured out on their own by providing the management and administrative support found in larger firms, including marketing, business development, digital marketing, tenders and proposals, events, and executive coaching. Not everybody needs these services 100% of the time so we provide the services on a retainer or project basis.
As the business has grown, Lacuna’s service offering has evolved to offer back-office support to a variety of industries, predominantly in professional services.”
That’s so interesting, so where did the idea come from to incorporate Josef bots into your service offering?
Bronwyn: “In providing services in the legal space, we have seen the amazing functionality that Josef provides. Given we’ve identified that our skills and services are highly transferable to other industries, we recognised the potential to transfer the Josef technology in the same way.”
Amazing, so tell us about the bots you built and how they work.
Bronwyn: “Currently in rotation is the Lacuna Bid and Tender tool which walks users through a series of questions, adding numerical weights to responses, helping to determine if a particular opportunity is worth pursuing. It can be overwhelming knowing where to start when a tender opportunity arises, so by guiding users through a series of questions about the opportunity, the Bid and Tender tool will help assess whether the opportunity is viable to pursue and get a sense of where to focus time and resources, or seek help. On completion of the questions, Lacuna will assess the score and offer tailored resources to help – whether that be a complimentary consultation, or a downloadable decline to bid letter.”
Jordenne: “We also built Lacuna’s Website Health Check which I designed. This bot walks users through a short series of questions and exercises that perform an assessment on your website’s overall performance, generating a score that tells you how well your website is working.”
“People often forget that a website isn’t something you set and forget. It is a living part of your business and needs regular check ins to make sure it is performing optimally. The Website Health Check is a great first port of call to make sure everything is on track.”
Bronwyn: “From a technical standpoint we used Josef to attach scores and weightings to each of our answers. For example, in the bid and tender tool if one of the users says ‘I’ve got a really good relationship with this client, I’ve got a lot of the material pre-written I know a lot about them, I’ve got the time to do this project and it’ll be profitable,’ then the scores will say 10 out of 10.”
“If they answer and say, ‘we don’t really know the client, we think our competitors might have slightly better skills, we’re really under-resourced,’ they might get a score of 0 and we would suggest a conversation with us to consider the benefits of proceeding with the bid. If needed, we can supply a decline to bid letter. If they score somewhere in the midrange, we’ll let them know that there could be potential with the support of additional resources, perhaps even from Lacuna.
Jordenne: “It was fun learning about the weightings and it makes for a more interactive experience; we’re able to provide on the spot advice as a direct result of the responses provided to the bot. It’s been quite an innovative use of Josef to add those weightings, but, ultimately it’s just to help clients with tailored, useful answers or support.”
With two bots built and successfully launched, what’s next for Lacuna & Josef?
Jordenne: “There’s a number of other tools that we have in the pipeline. These were the first two to get up and running. We see so many things within what we do, that we can adapt to Josef. Watch for further developments over the next few months.”