Empathy is crucial in the foundation of trust in a relationship and is equally important when introducing new technologies. We need empathy in order to explore how data and technology can be used to design customer experiences that are more human. Bots allow you to personalise services and solve problems on an individual level.
I thought this was a fresh, surprising and compelling human approach, so I went on a quest to create an InMobi assistant. This project started as a challenge to educate InMobi’s clients about Data Science to explain the power of mobile data in a fun and approachable way. As a result of this, and based on our Footfall Methodology, Polygon was born! But you can call him Poly.
Call him Poly - Creating a Mobile Data Chatbot
After testing different flows for the first time, I recognised then that it should be less about prescribing the conversation, and more about enabling it. What ‘enabling it’ actually meant, was facilitating the entire customer journey inside of messaging.
I used the Retrieval-based model, which is simple as a rule-based expression match. These systems don’t generate any new text, they just pick a response from a fixed set. For now, people still want bots to be bots.
Taking advantage of the rich display features: send gifs, images, actions and payment buttons, marketers, designers and brands can use behaviour as the medium to design experiences that are more contextually relevant, timely and human. To put this to the test, I also created my own conversational agent ASTRID BOT:
Conversational UI
The conversational UI and the story component will bring a new source of data to understand customer behaviour and intentions resulting in an experience that is tailored to an individual.
Things to consider: Does it have a menu? Do we need to embed videos? Understanding NLP, integrations to APIs, no back buttons, no home button, etc...
Unsurprisingly, crafting compelling conversational flows is really hard. Probably the hardest part of the entire process! And if you are looking to add an extra layer of flair, intrigue, and personality, you will need storytelling skills to deliver stronger narratives.
We need empathy to go beyond logic and engage emotion and intuition, so bring humour and light-heartedness to business and products - If you enjoy it, they will enjoy it too!
1. START SIMPLE
2. BUILD FOR CONVERSATION
3. KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE
4. WORK AROUND CONSTRAINTS
5. TEST, TWEAK AND TEST AGAIN!
