SeaBot - A giant leap for innovating logistics

In the year 2019, chatbots are nothing new. They’ve been around as far back as the 1960’s, when Joseph Weizenbaum of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology introduced ELIZA, the first chatbot to ever be encoded

For the shipping and logistics industry however, chatbots powered by artificial intelligence is – perhaps unsurprisingly - a scarcely tapped resource.

At Sealand – A Maersk Company Asia, we have come to recognize the enormous potential of artificial intelligence. If harnessed correctly, it can offer significant value to our customers and make their day to day lives much simpler.

This recognition is how SeaBot was born.

How customer feedback led to innovation

A close look at our Customer Satisfaction Survey tells us that our customers feel that ease of making contact, responsiveness and being kept informed during transit are our areas for improvement. This feedback became the guiding principles behind the development of SeaBot.

We made sure that SeaBot would be readily and easily accessible on top messaging apps that we know our customers are already using, including Messenger, LINE, WhatsApp and many more. Through keyword recognition and intuitive, natural language processing, SeaBot assimilates customer queries and reverts with an answer instantaneously.

The benefit is clear – through SeaBot, customers get immediate answers to their questions with just a few flicks of a finger. Gone are the days when a customer would need to queue over the phone lines or wait 2 hours for an email response to get an answer to simple questions like “When is my shipment arriving?”. All that is needed is send to SeaBot a chat, get an answer, and move on with their day. Fast, simple, easy.

And with more and more customers turning to SeaBot for answers to simple queries, our customer service teams are free to focus on solving complex issues faster and spend more time strengthening relationships with our customers.

SeaBot and the future

We first introduced SeaBot in 2018, to our customers in Indonesia. Today, over a year later, SeaBot is already available in seven countries covered by Sealand Asia, on four instant messaging platforms (with two more under development) and multiple languages. The support and feedback from our customers has been incredibly encouraging, and it’s only driving us to further improve SeaBot’s value offering.

We are working on getting SeaBot available on 7 more countries over the course of the next few months, whilst we continue to improve its capabilities across the board.