Before we give you the keys to a successful bot project, we’ll start by mentioning the best ways to fail your bot deployment within your organisation.
Indeed, if you want to fail, apply one of these points below and you will be sure that your bot will not be used properly.
I promise, then, we will give you the keys to make your project SUCCESSFUL!
The recipe for failure
Let’s discover together the recipe for failure:
- Get your content tested by users who participated in the development.
- Don’t take user feedback into account: when a user asks a question, sometimes they will ask it in a totally different way than you planned (here I’m talking about bots that already know how to recognise formulations since there are some that only match a sentence). It must be able to give feedback to the platform in some way.
- Be sure that users will ONLY use the bot as you had imagined: obviously it’s human. When using a bot, users will want to test everything they can think of. In this case, asking questions that don’t make sense or trying to trick it for fun.
The points listed above can lead to the following situations:
- Your chatbot answers “I don’t know” whenever a question is not found
The solution? Your exit scenarios must include assistance:
- Try to refine what the user is saying
- Suggest appropriate scenarios
- Redirect to a human
- Search in a EDM / on a website
- Create a ticket
- Your chatbot does not evolve FAST
Here are some suggested solutions:
- Plan the monitoring and updating of content very regularly
- Prefer a solution that will facilitate user feedback and provide complete usage metrics
- Prefer a solution that will be able to adapt without human interaction and manage user feedback
- Do not diversify your knowledge
A solution?
- Start with knowledge and automation scenarios.
Focus on the content first: the bot is only a CHANNEL through which your knowledge is broadcasted
Plan a bot project
When considering a chatbot project, there are going to be several issues to put on the table. For example:
- The number of bots: To choose your platform, you will have to plan not only for the first project but also the long-term use.
- What will be the target population? Here again, this will raise many questions, both about usage and about the scenarios that need to be automated and the content that needs to be produced. It is interesting to do this beforehand to avoid any rejection of the chatbot by users. The project will also be different if the bot is intended for a purely internal or external population.
- Where will you deploy your bot(s) (Web, SharePoint, Digital Workplace, Microsoft Teams, etc.)? This is a very important question since, depending on the targeted media, some solutions will be self-limiting
- Who governs/supports them? Making chatbots available without keeping them up to date is one of the main causes of bot deployment failure. Beyond the content that needs to be kept up to date, there is also the management of scopes, day-to-day support, and new requirements.
- Security, RGPD and compliance: Yes, there is no way to avoid these subjects since a bot can theoretically ask you for personal information. In this case, you must make sure that they are able to keep the processing register up to date.
Of course, there are other topics that need to be treated in advance of your chatbot project, so don’t hesitate to contact us to make your project a success!