How to build a strategy for developing Chat Bots for your Organization

Strategizing Chat Bot for your organization

Chat Bots are the quickest and most cost effective way of listening to your customers’ interactions.

You may be a huge Tech giant or a baby start up, the key to your success will always be addressing your customers’ needs. Your customers might be asking you for more information about your products or might be complaining about the issues that they are facing. With increase in the engagement with customers it becomes really important for the organizations to understand issues, identify patterns, troubleshoot the problem and respond back to the customers.

The mainstream approach is to build a services team that will handle all the conversations with your customers. Your customers may contact you via numerous platforms such as phone calls, chat messages, emails, SMS etc.

Definitely providing better service leads to a better customer experience but with added services comes added operational costs. Every agent you hire, who answers to the customers’ engagements, have a cost to the company. Hence optimizing the cost while maintaining a high level of service becomes of utmost importance.

One of the most effective way to optimize the service to your customers is by embracing the AI. Using automation in your organization will lead to less dependency on the human efforts and a very cost effective alternative to your Organization’s problem.

With the advent of Big Data and Data Science it has become really easy to develop chat bots for your customers. Chat Bots have the capability to understand the intent of the customer’s queries and can respond back with a relevant response.

The benefits of having a Chat Bot are:

1. Chat Bots are cost effective
2. Really smart at understanding customer’s intent
3. Can figure out a good response to the customers
4. Handle multiple conversations with great accuracy
5. Keeps the data well organized and tag the conversations that can be used for back-end analysis

So definitely Chat Bot can be a very effective solution to your Organization’s problems but the questions then arises is: How to Develop a strategy to implement Chat Bots? Can we just ask someone to develop a Chat Bot without mapping out the strategy? What questions should a Chat Bot handle and what should go to a human agent?

Well, in this article we will just limit ourselves to developing a Chat Bot implementation strategy in an organization. The actual Data Science behind the job is a topic for another day.

So here it goes:

Step 1: Understanding the need/value

Its always good to start with a top-to-bottom approach. Never forget that Chat Bots are one of the many solutions out there. Make sure that implementing a Chat Bot really adds value to your organization. The best way to analyze the value of automating a conversation with customers is to do a Cost Analysis. Do a study and calculate the per conversation cost the organization incurs when a human agent is talking with the customer and then multiply it with the total number of conversations, that will then quantify the scenario in dollar values and can be a good metric to optimize!

Lets assume your organization has a total cost of $1.5 per conversation with a customer and you handle 3M conversations every year. Thus your organization spends $4.5M every year on providing that service to your customers. If you are able to automate atleast 30% of the total conversations with your customers, you will be able to save $1.35M per year for your organization.

Step 2: Data Excavation

Alright, so now we have the motivation for themanagement! They only understand cost impact and you have now provided them with a dollar saving initiative. Now lets dive in on how to strategize the chat bot.

A wise man once said ~ The best way to strategize for the future is by looking into the learnings from our past!

Go back to all the conversations, identify the themes of those conversations. Are the agents tagging the conversations on a regular basis? If yes then use those tags to calculate their volumes. For example, lets say for an ecommerce company X here are the following past conversations with its customers along with tags:

So its evident that customers are facing more problems while make payments on X’s website. Hence using the volumes you can proritize the areas you would want to automate first. Higher the volumes, higher the amount of time your organization is investing in responding to your customers.

In Natural Language Processing we call these tags as customer intents because those are the central reason for the customers to engage with your service providing team.

Step 3: Prioritizing the Intents

Now since you have volumes of all the intents (tags) you can prioritize them i.e. automate the ones that are high in volume and then move ahead with then ones that are lower in volumes. In the above case the organization X will first try to automate conversations with the customers regarding payment being declined and then think about other intents.

Step 4: Development of Chat Bot

Now all you have to do is to design your strategy in an MVP approach. MVP stands for Minimum Viable Product and is a term used in Agile Methodology which means that you don’t need to build the whole product to be able to enter the market but you can start with a product which has a one functionality, launch it, analyze the customer’s response, improve it and then keep adding more and more features to your product.

So approach your Chat Bot development team with 3 versions of MVP:

MVP1: Automation of Payment Declined Conversations

MVP2: Automation of Account Password Conversations

MVP3: Automation of Product Query Conversations

So this basically summarizes the major steps an organization should take to build a strategy to develop a Chat Bot!

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