Smart FAQ Bot: A Smarter Way to Provide Effective Services
Joining Version 1 as an Associate Consultant as part of their graduate scheme, Accelerate, I’m currently working as part of Version 1’s Innovation Labs team. Being part of the Innovation Labs has allowed me to explore new technology and be involved in some very exciting projects, such as Augmented Reality and the Smart FAQ Bot. This post will have a focus on Chatbots and my experience with them at Version 1.
Introduction to Chatbots
A Chatbot is a piece of Artificial Intelligence (AI) software which is designed to simulate conversations with users. Chatbots are typically designed to simulate a human as a conversational partner and are often used online and in messaging applications. Communication can be through a range of methods, such as text, audio, and graphical interfaces. Advanced Chatbots can be integrated with Natural Language Processing, but the majority of Chatbots currently scan for keywords and pull for results based on the initial query.
Traditional FAQ Pages
We are surrounded by a huge amount of information, about any and every topic you can think of. With this amount of information comes queries and questions, from not just customers, but businesses and employees as well. Businesses need to provide information to their customers for a variety of reasons, such as resolving customer queries and providing them with appropriate answers. The need for providing consumers with immediate answers led to the creation of FAQ pages, which can now be seen on almost every company’s website. These FAQ pages provide answers to most of the frequently asked questions about a company or product. This method of providing answers has proven to be effective, but the process of landing on a company’s website, looking for an FAQ page and scrolling to find an answer gets tedious and boring for customers.
In order to improve the FAQ experience for customers, Version 1 Innovation Labs have created a solution which integrates FAQ pages into a Chatbot. This is a complete, new way of redefining the customer experience through the use of AI.
There has been a significant increase in the use of AI-based Chatbots by companies to provide instant responses via a live chat messenger. Version 1's Smart FAQ bot provides the benefits of a conventional Chatbot and gives its users a deeper insight into the analytics of questions asked, thus providing multiple benefits to the business.
A brief history of Chatbots:
The idea of Chatbots came in the 1950s, through a test developed by Alan Turing called ‘The Turing Test’. This was intended to test a computer’s ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human. The Turing Test involved 3 players, two humans, and a computer, with the human asking a question and receiving two responses. The human would then try to identify which player is a human and which is a computer. Although the computer performed well at some points, it lost in proving itself 100% effective in the test. This experiment laid the foundations for the growth of artificial intelligence.
The first conversational bot
Eliza, the first-ever conversational bot was created in the 1960s, and invented by Joseph Weizenbaum at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT. This experiment was intended to display the depth of conversation between a man and a machine, but there were some limits to this, such as lack of learning and recall ability. This revolutionised how we thought about the power of machines and paved the way for projects designed for effective interactions between humans and computers.
Since then, there have been multiple major developments in the field of Chatbots by innovators in the industry such as Facebook, IBM, Intel and more.
Use Cases:
Chatbots are transforming the way businesses provide support to their customers. The impact of Chatbots on market has been significant, creating a positive impact on businesses in different sectors. Due to the ever-growing potential of Chatbots, the solution is being adopted in a variety of industries.
Financial Services
Companies in the financial sectors are using conversational Chatbots. For example, Bank of America has “Erica” as its digital assistant for providing conversations through voices or text, whereas Capital One has “Eno” as their customer service Chatbot. Another good example is Wells Fargo’s Facebook Chatbot which responds to queries in relation to accounts.
Retail & E-Commerce
The use of Chatbots is growing within the retail and e-commerce sector. Chatbots are making the shopping experience smoother and easier, with fashion retailer H&M launching its own customer service Chatbot for purchasing products.
News & Media
Another example is CNN’s KIK bot, which is designed to provide users with the latest news updates. Users can choose to read the top news or news by any chosen topic, which highlights the Chatbot’s ability to learn its user preferences.
Case Study: KLM
In September 2017, KLM created an AI customer service bot, which was featured on Facebook Messenger. Passengers with KLM can interact with this Chatbot, retrieving flight details directly within the conversation. The Chatbot provides users with answers to frequently asked questions, such as flight status updates, check-in reminders, boarding passes or connecting to a customer service agent.
KLM launched their Chatbot to provide quick response to millions of questions coming from their customers simultaneously. Marine van der Lee — KLM’s Director of social media, explained why KLM chose to use a Chatbot for customer services.
“We always want to be where our customers are, and the sheer volume of questions from our customers within just a couple of weeks proved there was this huge interest in Messenger,” Martine explains. “On the one hand, this was a major opportunity. On the other hand, we struggled to cope with this massive growth in volume. We had to look into different solutions because we couldn’t keep on adding extra FTE agents to handle it.”
Version 1 Innovation Labs: Smart FAQ Bot
As part of Version1’s Innovation Labs, the Smart FAQ Bot was my first project. This project helped me gain a deeper insight into Chatbots and the technology and architecture behind them. This solution enables businesses to capture the most frequently asked questions by staff and/or customers and make that easily available to be queried in a natural and conversational manner using Artificial Intelligence techniques. The bot makes use of Microsoft’s cloud-based tool ‘QnAMaker’ to store questions and answers. QnAMaker provides a sophisticated way to store FAQ pages, product manuals and other forms of documents. This project powered up the way to use conversational Chatbots by making it smart. Smart FAQ bot not only provides all the functioning of a conventional Chatbot to provide customer services, but it also comes with an intuitive web interface for non-technical content or FAQ page owners to manage and publish their content.
I worked on Smart FAQ Bot’s dashboard, which is a powerful addition to the bot. The analytics dashboard displays statistics and analytics of the bot’s performances, as well as details about multiple aspects of FAQ’s. For example, the dashboard displays the total number of questions asked for a particular time period, how many of those were answered and how many answers were found satisfactory by the user. This dashboard also enables the business to manage details about content owners by adding or deleting them. This solution uses a mix of best of breed Microsoft cloud technologies to provide these core Chatbot capabilities. You can find out more about Smart FAQ Bot here.
Working with the Smart FAQ Bot has given me a deeper insight into the power of AI and how it can be used to change the way we process and provide information. Using AI, I believe the quality of work will increase significantly in the future and soon enough, these intelligent machines will be able to do our work in the blink of an eye.
The mission of the Innovation Labs is to implement customer-focused solutions collaboratively, which use innovative tools and technologies to bring business benefits to the customer and drive customer success, innovative thinking and ingenuity. In the Innovation Labs, we work with cutting-edge technologies to provide robust solutions. Find out more about Innovation at Version 1 here.
