Get to know a ChatBot
Max sat at his desk and opened the emails from his new adventure website that he had launched a month ago. He was receiving a great response from his site. Just then the clock hit 12:00 AM, his phone was reminding about an early morning meeting. He threw back his hands and wondered how I am going to keep up with all this, an demanding day job, a growing website, not enough cash to hire an assistant!
He picked up the phone and called his friend Joe, he knew Joe was a night owl. Joe said hay pal why you don’t create a ChatBot, it can answer most of the questions on your website, so you don’t have to do all these emails. ChatBot said Max I am all ears, Joe continued, I can define ChatBot as follows “Chatbot is a program designed to simulate conversations with its users”. You would need an FAQ ChatBot, which can take questions from the users and provide them with relevant information in a simple chat format.
Max was not sold out, he said I already have an FAQ page on my site, it is still not helping much. Joe smiled and said here is the problem with standard FAQ,
Problems with Standard FAQ
• The user has to scan through the complete document to identify topics of interest
• One has to move back and forth to gather information required
• No way to report if information user is looking for is not present
Max, I see the point but I support search on the FAQ page! Joe said that would not take away the problem either,
Problems with Standard FAQ With Search
• The user has to come with correct top-level keywords to get relevant results
• User has to scan through the results to locate information he/she is looking for
• Sub-searches are generally not supported or hard to support
Max, OK so how is a Chatbot different ? Joe said here goes,
How ChatBots are better at handling FAQ
• User asks what he/she wants to know in plain English and gets relevant information as a reply
• The user can further query for detailed information, again in plain English
• Get to required information quick and easy
• No training or skilling required
• Condition-based tuning of answers for a personalized experience
Max, I am beginning to like the idea, Is there more I can derive from the Chatbot approach? Joe said absolutely, let me state it out from you,
Limitations of Standard FAQ approach
• Limited user engagement
• No feedback if the provided FAQ’s cover the all the information user is looking for
• No feedback on what information was exactly consumed by the user
• No feedback on if the user liked the information presented
• Not possible or hard to exactly estimate the information request patterns
• No easy way to adjust results based on conditions and patterns
With the ChatBot approach, we take the game to a whole new level,
Advantages of ChatBot Approach
• Superior user engagement
• Feedback on information coverage, exact information requested
• Sentiment analysis to identify if the user liked or disliked the information
• Easy identification of information flows
• Machine learning and Smart algorithms can be employed to present relevant information quickly (continually improving) based on conditions and query patterns
Max OK buddy I am up for this idea, I am glad I called you, can you help me with architecture and implementation of the ChatBot? Joe, no problems pal, let us catch up tomorrow evening to discuss the architecture for ChatBot. Max, Sound good, let us catch up.