Chatbot Development

* Edit this post was created in 2020. Then were were looking forward, now we are looking back at Artificial Intelligence.

Chatbot Development and Chatbots are part of the first wave of Artificial Intelligence (AI) delivering commercially viable functionality for businesses and organisations. Like all the digital tools before it, the Chatbot Development challenge is to deliver real value, giving users functional benefits unachievable with existing technology; For example; live-chat or  FAQs.

Strategy comes first as always – what are you building this Chatbot for? Early applications we are seeing for clients are broken down into key areas, Customer Support, Sales Funnel Assistance, and; Internal Knowledge Bases.

All of which have significant benefits to users. One of the obvious ones, is reduction of time to get to the right information for clients / users. Some of the case studies for customer service, are showing for example, that hold times on the phone can be cut by over 98% and reduction in phone call volumes as much as 54%.

Similarly pre-sales pathways are reducing ‘bad leads’ dramatically, passing warm, framed leads to sales teams, and leading enquiries that aren’t sales based to be handled by the Chatbot, saving valuable resources and time for team members.   We are working with Oracle’s digital assistant technology on our chatbot development, and the categories our Chatbots are handling include;

Chatbot Development sits across digital as an always-on, always available assistant which can add huge value to many communications. Build one and you have an army, as a Chatbot is scalable to have hundreds of thousands of conversations at once, unlike the limited resources of a call centre or your team. Best of all they work 24/7.

Human Conversational Chatbot Development

AndMine’s Chatbot Development has a overaching goal for all projects; aim to pass the Conversational Turing Test, the obvious benchmark if an AI can be perceived as human. A common goal, based on use cases, is to ensure the chats are better than any overseas or out-sourced live chat – Seats for live chat needs training and a script to represent your business well, what happens if that dedicated (or shared) seat leaves, retraining or loss of quality – While a Chatbot can be constantly improved to take on and answer more and more questions without limitation, with more local knowledge and accuracy. Plus if you’ve got 2 or more seats on live chat, chatbots are already starting to compete on price – and with the unlimited scaling and reduction of technology pricing over time, this is only going to become more mainstream for organisations.

Where can you deploy a chatbot?

Where can Chatbots be installed? Basically anywhere with an open API. Chatbots can talk directly into websites and do all the conversations on Facebook (minimising community management), the list though is endless, you can run this over Skype, into SMS, etc etc;

Rich Data on Chatbots;

Aside from pure communication capabilities, Chatbots can also be connected to any API to pull data, for example; To your database, CRM, or knowledge base, to share even more precise info to the conversation. Rich documents and data can be provided with ease embedded into the conversational flow. 

AndMine’s Chatbot Development Process;

Built upon Oracle’s market leading Chatbot AI (Artificial Intelligence) engine, our goal for Chatbot Development for your organisation is aimed at the human conversation level. And while there are a lot of chatbot / digital assistant platforms on the market, we vetted a ton of them and found only a few capable of handling human communications that didn’t end up clunky. The process to achieve these results for our clients includes ;

1. Confirming Chatbot Development Reasons and Strategy for Commercial Outcomes.
2. Defining Chatbot Communication Data Flow (Initial Intents as Pictured Below)
3. Chatbot Copywriting from Multichoice data flow diagrams to pure conversational queries and responses. With the overarching goal of Human or Near Human conversation.
4. Integrating Realtime Data – eg Database, CRM or Knowledge base.
5. Improving chats with past project tips and tricks eg. Adding in our 200+ Small-Talk Module to maximise conversation flow.
6. Pre-live Conversational Beta and Turing Tests
7. Deployment to Live Platform(s)
8. Post Live Testing and Ongoing Training

Our Chatbot Development Process combined with Oracle’s AI Digital Assistant Platform reduces costs, reduces resourcing, improves user experience. If you’re thinking about developing a chatbot for your organisation, or would like to discuss / brainstorm ideas on how a Chatbot could benefit your organisation, please contact us.