Building a chat bot that actually works for your business (part 1)

Maria Melisa
Chatbots Life
Published in
10 min readMar 26, 2021

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Disclaimer: this post also serves as my notes over the years building various chat bots with various vendors, so this will get updated from time to time.

Disclaimer 2 : to make this post neutral, I won’t be mentioning any vendor names here.

My professional career requires me to dabble a lot in support suites, and soon enough chat bot became a part of the equation. I’ve experimented with a lot of approaches in my quest to build a quote unquote magical bot —from building them inhouse with our own NLP library, exploring local and international vendors, to doing a hybrid approach — all in order to build one that we all dream will be smart enough (one day) to tackle virtually all incoming inquiries; fluent enough to sound like a human — you know the dream. Many dreams shattered later, feet grounded to earth; these are my notes of the lessons I’ve learned the hard way from building a handful bad bots, to bots that are decent enough to earn a stable stream of good CSAT ratings even in their bad days (e.g. production issues).

First thing first — It’s important to understand that it would be extremely hard if your aim is to build your chatbot with the goal of your bot being able to answer ALL of your customer’s inquiries — at least with the current technology. At best, they can answer general questions or handle fixed-flow request (e.g. checking a payment status, simple onboardings). Hence, it’s always a good idea to build a chatbot with a fallback mechanism in place (e.g. live agent fallback), and give clear expectations from the very beginning to your users of what the chatbot can and cannot do. Think of it as a system of ‘chat support service’ — bot is just one half of the system, but what completes is the presence of measures to flexibly respond to unprecedented situations; only then the system is close to complete.

First and foremost — verify what are the capabilities that your vendor can support.

Obviously, unless your business has invested a lot in NLP technologies, your best bet will be to look for a vendor to build the base bot for you, before you fine-tune it on your own. Generally, a few rules of thumbs that I use when scouting for a vendor, aside from standard service quality checks (e.g. how fast they respond to your inquiries etc) :

  • The flexibility of designing the conversation flow and UI/UX elements along with training your bot with new topics, questions, and utterances. If they say that you can customize on your own via the dashboard, drill it down during the demo / trial period. Otherwise, if they say that they will provide a dedicated account manager / product team for you, lock down their commitment on how fast they can deliver your request. This is incredibly important because there’s no prevalent formula in building a good bot; it all depends on the nature of your users and your business — which means you will be spending A LOT of time A/B testing UI/UX elements, scripts, conversation flows, etc. Minor details especially matter when it comes to building a chatbot. For example; we had issues for months in trying to boost the number of CSAT responses; we’ve tried everything — an input based CSAT where users need to type the numbers, button-based CSAT, changing the number of rating options, etc. Accidentally, we found out during our nth test, that changing the CSAT format into clickable star ratings actually boosted our CSAT feedback to over 500%. This formula might not work for your chatbot, hence the need to verify your vendor’s flexibility in supporting your A/B tests. Imagine if just to ask for a simple UI change in CSAT format, it’ll take you two months to get it implemented (we’ve been there!).
  • The bot vendor’s NLP proficiency in your target language. This might not be too relevant if you’re only supporting English language bot, but you might have realized during your search for a great NLP library, that outside of the English community, it’s usually few and far between; depending on how active and prolific the NLP community in your particular target language. You can also opt for a strictly input/button based bot, but I found out that users are less willing to engage with this type of bot other than for very simple queries because these users often would make a premature judgement that the bot will not be able to help with their questions. Hence supporting a free form, NLP based input from your customers actually will help with your bot’s engagement rate, and to make your bot sounds natural at least during the happy paths. My recommendation is to actually test your vendor’s live bot in their customer’s web/app, or at the very least, ask them to provide you with an interactive demo. This is incredibly important because improving NLP is a long term investment; this can’t be done overnight (or even within a few weeks/months!). Once you’ve locked in a vendor, switching cost is high especially because of the number of resources you will have to pour to train or improve the bot, so make sure you know what you’ll get before you sign the deal.
  • Explore the vendor dashboard’s analytical capabilities — a few things that I usually look for when analyzing a potential vendor’s dashboard includes the bot performance statistics (e.g. handover rate, CSAT rating, unidentified utterance, and the capability to see individual messages / download raw data). Either they provide this by default, or the vendor has the capability to build custom analytics. This is monumental because a good analytical capability makes a world’s difference in helping you train the bot post live. Why? With most products, it’s easy to get product feedbacks, be it bug reports, or feature requests via app reviews, or support channels, etc. With chat bots, the only way to get direct feedback is by observing your analytics. You’ll be surprised how many vendors actually do not provide CSAT analytics by default.

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Your work doesn’t end when your bot finally goes live. In fact, it has only just begun.

Expect to put a lot of resources to finetune your bot after it goes live. In fact, be prepared to pour even more time and work to finetune your bot. Your bot vendor most of the time does not have your domain/industry’s specific knowledge, hence the task to fine-tune your bot to cater for your customer’s needs will fall upon you. Your vendor might be able to help you implement your plan, but the analysis, research, scripting, conversation flow design, training, fallback design and many other inputs will need to come from you.

Design your conversation flow with the intention to help your customer

If there’s a frustrated user who needs to talk to a human agent, don’t make it difficult for them to do so. Understand that these user segments are not intended to be handled by your bot; forcing them to talk to the bot does not help either them or your business. While this doesn’t necessarily mean that you should put the option to connect to Agent directly from the get-go, provide an easy to access fallback option on every scenario when bot fails to answer.

For example ; let’s say that your bot is unable to identify your customer utterance. In cases like this, offer your frustrated customers a few options — a. Bot can’t understand your question, is this what you mean? b. If not, do you want to talk to our agent?

You might think that your users by default will choose to talk to agent, but think of it this way :

  • Your bot being unable to answer, frustrating your customer, AND your customer getting frustrated due to not being able to talk to an agent are actually two different problem statements. Solve them separately instead of looking for a single solution that solves both. Your customer might want to talk to an agent because your bot is unable to answer their questions — hence the solution is not preventing them to talk to your agent because the root cause is your bot capability itself. On the other hand, a frustrated customer because he/she’s facing a technical issue or fraud are not your bot’s target user anyway. Don’t frustrate them even more by making it difficult for them to get the help they need. Remember the reason you’re building the bot in the first place; it’s to cater to your customer needs better.
  • The percentage might varies, but typically 40% of inquiries that come to businesses are actually frequently asked questions that do not need a human touch. If you are optimizing your bot to handle these commonly asked questions, there is no reason for them to talk to the agent anyway.
  • Sometimes we underestimate the number of users who actually prefer not to talk to human unless they really have to. They actually comprise a larger percentage of your user than you might have imagined.
  • If the majority of your users ask to talk to the agent, you might want to analyze further what went wrong. It could be that they might be repeating customers who have built a distrust over the capability of your bot to solve their problem, perhaps due to a bad first experience with your bot; or your bot has gained notoriety of being incapable to solve the customer’s issues, thus is being perceived as a hindrance instead of a helping hand.
  • Making it easier for users to talk to human actually helps you to buy some time to improve your bot. Your bot will not be immediately smart from Day 1. Undoubtedly, you will need to pour a lot of effort, resources and time to tweak your bot; with the presence of a human as a fallback option, this will actually buy you time to be able to think, research, and experiment what will actually work to improve your bot’s accuracy and coverage.

Opt for interactive, visual-based call-to-action (CTA) inputs for flows like CSAT to improve rate of CSAT survey

I mentioned it above, but this is something that I learned from my past experience building a few bots — the principle is that your users actually have zero incentive (unless they’re a disgruntled customer) to provide you with feedbacks; hence make it as easy and painless as possible for them to provide their feedback. Opt for a way that requires almost no effort from user to provide their feedback — I found that visual-based CTA inputs that’s commonly used / easy to understand intuitively actually works much better than type-based CTA (which requires actual effort from users to a) comprehend how the rating scale works, is 1 the best, or is 5 the best? b) how should I provide the input? Numbers only? numbers with description? c)and finally, type the numbers).

The nuances in your copy are important. A/B test them.

I’ve handled multiple products in my professional career years, be it an onboarding tool or a fraud detection system, but I found that chat bot is actually that one product that heavily relies on frequent A/B testing for the little details and nuances, much much more than any other products. You’ll be surprised by how little changes to your script (e.g making it in bullet point format instead of paragraphs, tweaking word choices, etc) can make a major impact on your user’s engagement metrics.

I usually do it several ways; going through the users’ list of unidentified utterances or negative feedback analytics, but I found that context is also incredibly important to understand the nuances of the user’s feedback; hence I often go through our user’s actual conversation with the bot in order to understand the conversation nuances and context. For example, a particular script that we use to prompt users to provide input — either click the button to choose to connect to agent, or type your questions if you want to access the FAQ; often leads to a bad CSAT rating. Going through the conversations, we found out that users often misinterpret the instruction; thinking that if they typed the questions they’ll be connected to the agent. A simple formatting change in that particular question actually reduced the occurrence of bad CSAT ratings for that particular flow.

Finally, design a fallback mechanism for every possible turn of events that your bot can’t handle

This does not just refer to human fallback, but includes various types of possible scenario that your bot might not be able to handle. Some example scenarios :

  • Your user wants to connect to human, but your agent is only available during business hour. This is a tough scenario to crack; hence you’ll need to experiment with what will work for your business; either by managing your users expectation upfront that your agent is only available during business hours, provide a contact form they can use during non-business hours so that they can still ask their questions, etc etc.
  • Your bot can’t exactly identify your user’s utterance. You might want to explore a few flows; such as prompting users to the closest topic that bot think might be what your customer is looking for; ask them whether they want to connect to an agent, have your bot ask your user to paraphrase their questions, etc.
  • Your bot got unexpected input for that particular conversation junction. Some kind of input validations might be useful to implement in this kind of scenario.

Closing

Finally, one lesson of great importance that I’ve had as a take away from all these learnings is that to QC often by going through the actual messages. Some issues or nuances are hard to capture using analytics alone. Make it a habit to go through your user’s end-to-end conversations, you’ll be surprised how much more issues you can capture (that might not be apparent in your analytics), or how straightforward it is to solve a particular problem that you’re trying to solve.

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Currently scaling payment stuffs and make them secure at Gojek & Midtrans. Part time professional tea drinker.