S3 Ep. 2 How not to bot

Jane Hendricks (02:25):

Expectations for bots are high. Companies will look to bots to do everything from deflecting simple interactions to completely automating and revolutionizing self-service. And pretty much everything in between. And when you have expectations that are so high, there’s no way all those expectations can be met.

Jane Hendricks (04:17):

Some bots weren’t necessarily put in place for the right reason or built the right way. What do I mean by that? When you have a positive interaction with a bot, the bot fits into your experience seamlessly. It’s able to understand what you say; it’s able to respond; and it doesn’t leave you with that dead end. The experience is negative when the bot doesn’t help the customer solve their problem or advance on their customer journey.

There’s a lot we can do better to make that experience more holistic, more empathetic. For example, make sure it fits within a journey; that it’s not isolated. Make sure that it’s personalized and is talking with the human in their terms. Make sure there’s continuity; that the bot transitions the interaction to an agent if it can’t handle the request.

Jane Hendricks (06:49):

People will start with, “I need a bot, and this is what I want my bot to do.” But they don’t think about the bot in the context of the total experience and where would it make the most sense for the customer to put an automatic conversation in place. There are some markers to look for, like multiple entry points. That’s something that a bot can help facilitate.

If you start with determining what’s best to automate and what should stay high touch before you jump into what exactly the bot will do, what operational systems you’ll need, what language models you’ll need to build, etc., that will create a much better experience going forward.

Jane Hendricks (09:18):

I think it’s a combination. Some bots are built using keywords, not natural language. They’re not built to be conversational, so it’s not a great experience. A bot that tries to do too much is not such a good experience. And a bot that leaves you at a dead end is a problem… Not starting off with journey mapping and understanding how a bot fits, the odds of success are slim.

Jane Hendricks (16:50):

You want to make sure your bot can understand all the ways people are asking for whatever it is you want the bot to help with. And if somebody says something that is completely outside of that, you need to know that it’s being said and figure out what to do with it. That’s the importance of training a bot — and why it’s so critical that the bot fits within the context of the total journey.

Jane Hendricks (18:18):

Bots are automatic conversations. The business users and the people who own the customer experience have a sense of what those conversations should look like. So, putting tools to build these conversations into their hands will accelerate the time to market because now they have control over that input. But there are still areas where developers and linguists should be involved; you want the business and IT to work together.