Bayer is a life science company with focused products in the consumer health and pharmaceutical sector. With companies in over 90 countries, Bayer aims to provide solutions to key challenges that people face in the 21st Century, such as the need to improve people’s quality of life and medical care.

The Challenge

One of the key products that Bayer offers are oral contraceptives for women that can be used for family planning purposes. However, as high as 48% of millennial women have very low awareness about the contraceptive options available to them and the problem is exacerbated in Malaysia, where topics surrounding contraceptives are considered as taboo. This presents the problem of a huge knowledge gap amongst millennial women in Malaysia, which has severe consequences on women’s health, finances, and family plans.

Recognizing the challenge within the Malaysian market, Bayer set out to look for a solution to raise awareness of contraceptive options amongst local millennial women.

The Solution

Given the social barriers surrounding the topic of contraceptives, the solution had to provide a conducive channel where women could feel safe talking about contraceptives without judgement from others, while communicating reliable health information in an engaging manner.

Background research showed that Malaysian users are extremely digitally savvy, with the highest penetration rates on messaging platforms like Facebook Messenger. Given the established reach and high interactivity within a personal messaging space, they were the most ideal platforms to host a chatbot to reach out to millennial women in Malaysia and educate them about contraceptive options – hence the birth of Ask Maya, Bayer Malaysia’s very own family planning chatbot.

To invite users to trust and communicate freely with the chatbot, a persona was designed to simulate every woman’s BFF – Best Friend for Family Planning. The chatbot adopted a personable and relatable tone of voice to speak casually with users, with Maya’s avatar designed to look like a young millennial woman to evoke affinity and relevance.

With that, Ask Maya was created to help raise the awareness of contraceptives amongst women by providing them with:

• Reliable information about contraceptive methods
• Interesting articles and videos about contraception (in which users can subscribe to)
• Pill reminders to remind users to eat their pregnancy pills on time
• Advice for users who missed their pills across different scenarios
• *Replenish pill reminders to remind users to purchase their pregnancy pills directly with pharmacies online (coming soon)

Beyond providing information about contraceptives, Ask Maya also journeyed with users on their family planning efforts through features like pill reminders and missed pill advice. This seamlessly incorporated Bayer, as a brand, into their users’ lives and greatly augmented brand affinity and engagement with them despite the social stigma around contraceptives.

The Results

Within 3 months, the Ask Maya chatbot exceeded expectations by servicing a total of 12, 767 unique users on Messenger and addressing 89.7% of the queries without the need for human agents’ intervention. Maya also effectively engaged users with a high retention rate of 14.3%.

From the chatbot message blast campaigns, the Ask Maya chatbot achieved an average open rate of 75.9%, and an average CTR of 17.3%.