How consultants can build a profitable conversational experience with Botpress + Wordhop

A use case for building a hybrid human + AI conversational experience.

Wordhop is a great starting point for businesses developing a messaging strategy because it helps companies identify and balance the strengths of AI with the strengths of their own people. Every business is different, but if you can define the right use case for a conversational experience and then find the perfect mix of humans and AI, you can build a viable “Bot business”, while delighting customers

Wordhop was built to connect products. We’re not a bot building platform and we know that thousands of teams are embracing “Operating Systems” for business like Slack and MS Teams. As a connector, our goal is to build the bridge between your team and your customers.

When we started talking to Botpress, a developer-friendly bot building platform, we were immediately impressed with their vision for a connected architecture. With Botpress, you assemble your bot from a collection of specialized, open-source modules that do one thing very well. Examples include a module to integrate with Messenger, a module for broadcasting updates, a module for scheduling, and now with Wordhop, a 1–click module to bring humans in the loop. With Botpress, every feature is available as an API as well as a rich graphical interface, and since launching just a few months ago, thousands of developers have embraced the Botpress solution. If Wordhop is used to create the a perfect messaging mix of people and bots, Botpress lets you create the perfect bot by picking the modules you need to build your conversational experience.

Building with Botpress + Wordhop

A frequent question is “How do I monetize a bot?” Well, I’m going to give you an example use case that requires nothing more than Botpress + Wordhop, a payment plug-in offered by Facebook, and your own knowledge.

The best way to look at a bot is as an extension of you. Let’s say you’re a consultant. You mission is to deliver service to your clients. Whether you’re in tech, finance, law, healthcare, or any area where you have domain expertise, your time is worth money. When you add a bot into your consulting workflow, you’re adding an assistant, an AI assistant that is capable of delighting your prospective and existing clients with free content as a value-added service, helping you provide more premium value added services, and then collecting payment from clients as you provide your service through messaging.

Getting Started

Step 1) Add Wordhop to Slack

To get started: Add Wordhop to Slack. Slack is where 1000’s of teams already run their business. As an consultant, you’ll be able to manage your conversational experience from Slack.

Step 2) Tell Wordhop about the bot you’re going to build

Once you add Wordhop to Slack, follow the prompt to Add a Bot (You can also say “Add a bot” at any time to Wordhop). Tell Wordhop the name of the bot your going to build:

3) Get Keys From Wordhop

Click Continue and Wordhop will give you an API Key and a Client Key. Each bot deployment has it’s own unique Client Key while an API Key is for your Wordhop account.

4) Create a Botpress account

Head over to Botpress.io and open a free account.

5) Add the Botpress for Messenger module

This will enable you to interact with customers through Facebook Messenger. Follow the steps to get setup with Facbeook Messenger if you have not done that already. You can also add the Botpress for Slack Module if you like, but you will need to go through the steps of adding a bot to Wordhop again. Keep in mind that Wordhop needs each bot deployment registered so that you can report on activity separately.

5) Add the Botpress subscription module

Next, add the Botpress module for content subscriptions

This enables your bot to offer daily news letters and alerts. You can use this module to send out daily stories in your industry for content marketing. People interested in your industry should find a daily news service to be useful. For example, we’re providing this article to you as a value added service hoping you may appreciate our insights. You often see consultants share articles on Medium, LinkedIn, or an industry related group on Facebook. I tend to write interesting stories just like this and these stories have become valuable lead generation tools for our business: 
https://chatbotslife.com/your-bot-strategy-is-dead-in-the-water-without-humans-in-the-loop-a967d207dcec

5) Add the Wordhop module

Next, add Wordhop

You’ll be asked to enter your Wordhop keys. Go back to Slack and grab your API Key and your Client Key and enter them into the form on Botpress.

Setup some custom triggers: Add custom triggers to alert you in Slack when a user may need assistance, such as when a user says ‘human’ ‘help’. In your bot’s messaging, you’ll want to include some messaging that says something to the effect of “If you need any assistance just say human, or help’”. Here is an example of the code to add to set up customer triggers, so that users of your content service can trigger an alert to Slack, and you can get take over and start to engage your user

Include the following lines of code where your bot listens for this intent:

// match an intent to talk to a real human

bp.hear({ type: 'message', text: 'human' }, (event, next) => {

// let the user know that they are being routed to a human

var responseText = 'Hang tight. A human is on the way.'

if (event.platform == "facebook") {

bp.messenger.sendText(event.user.id, responseText)

} else if (event.platform == "slack") {

bp.slack.sendText(event.channel.id, responseText)

}

// send a Wordhop alert to your slack channel

// that the user could use assistance

bp.events.emit('assistanceRequested', {platform: event.platform, raw: event.raw})

})

To test out your Wordhop integration, send your bot an intent you know it won’t understand. You should receive an alert in Slack. That is how you know it’s working. If you’re an independent consultant than you can run this messaging service yourself, but if you’re a large consulting firm, then you can also benefit from a messaging-based consultancy service and because Slack is team-based, your entire consulting firm can be working in Slack, and managing clients from a single interface.

5) Add a Natural Language Processing module.

This is also an optional step, but it’s strongly encouraged that you power your bot with even some basic natural language processing to have bi-directional communication with your customers. Wit.ai and API.ai are both popular, but we recommend API.ai and find it a little bit easier to use

6) Add in-app payments

This is an optional step, but if you’re an independent consultant, Facebook makes it easy to collect payments through your messaging experience.

As you provide your consulting expertise through Wordhop, you can bill your customers for your time without them leaving Messenger.

This is just a high level overview of a how you can build a messaging service, leveraging your domain expertise to engage potential and existing customers, and then provide them 1 on 1 premium services through the same channel using Wordhop.

Before you go, some things to consider:

1. If you’re a consultant without technical expertise to deploy a bot and would like us to introduce you to someone, contact us at Wordhop and we can make introductions.
2. If you’re a developer and looking to build conversational experiences for other independent consultants or consulting firms, contact us here
3. Recommend or share this if you found it useful. It gives me 🔋 to write knowing people find value in it.