SPEAKER: Creating a good user experience for customers
and the teams that maintain a chatbot agent
are both very important.
And so in this episode of Deconstructing Chatbots,
we will share seven best practices that
will tie in key pro moves you may
have seen in our prior lessons, but we'll touch more upon now.
So stay tuned.
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The first step is to future-proof
the names of intents.
As your agent supports a greater variety of topics,
the more successful the collaboration with others
will be by using explicit names.
A common practice is to format them
as your intention dot expected action.
Four common examples of these intents
are for information collection, confirmation,
supplemental questions, and redirecting to live agents.
Let's go through each.
For example, when collecting information
for helping a customer to purchase shoes for their pups,
you can name your intent shoes dot book
to collect parameters such as color and size.
Next, as a user navigates through your flows,
it's good to confirm and repeat back if the information was
correct or not.
Ergo, having two intents called confirmation
dot yes and confirmation dot no are useful.
And we'll talk more about these benefits using confirmation
yes no intents in a bit.
Then there are questions that customers may have that are not
core to your purchasing flow, but you
know are frequently asked.
Let's call these supplementals.
For example, customers are more interested in sustainability
and frequently ask Pugs--
are your products sustainably sourced?
Or may have questions about their account.
And as a fourth type of intent, known as redirect dot support
team, is meant to allow customers
to eject out of the flow to speak to a live person.
Next, let's talk about reusing intents and pages via the route
group functionality.
By designing your agent with reusability in mind,
it helps save time answering the same intent from anywhere
in the journey.
You can do this by creating multiple intents
and putting them together in a route group once.
And just modify every page to allow for that same group
to be used.
For example, you can put 100 supplemental intents
at the beginning of the flow and at the end
during the confirmation pages to enable
users to ask questions outside of the flow
and be brought back to the flow after getting answers.
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Next, you can train your agent with phrases in bulk
by uploading them.
This can be done by visiting the desired intent
and clicking the Upload icon to upload a CSV or txt file.
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Next tip is to add rephrased variations of questions
when you have required parameters,
since it will not stop asking this question
until it gets collected.
And it's good to rephrase the question up to three times,
then to pass a customer to a human
to avoid a bad user experience if the third try doesn't help.
This is a great rule of thumb, by the way, that all of us
have experienced at some point as consumers.
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And for yes/no questions, you want to say,
did I get that right?
And leverage the confirmation dot yes or no intents.
This brings us to the next point.
It's beneficial to reduce ambiguity
by repeating back what a person heard,
as it builds trust with the user.
Ergo, by using the money symbol and the name of the entity
in the fulfillment section, which
is the reply to the customer by the agent,
you can reaffirm to the customer what was understood from them.
This applies to both the extensive list
of system entities built into dialogue flows such as color
or date, for example, or custom ones you
build that you do not find as a system entity, such as size.
Next, to enable a user to erase their past intent,
for example--
I want red shoes.
Oh, wait.
Never mind.
You make an intent route called "go back" and make
the parameter ask to null.
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And finally, it's important to be testing your agent
as frequently as possible when building it
bit by bit to catch errors faster.
You can do this by going to the test agent functionality
on the top right side.
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And there you have it--
seven best practices for building a robust agent that
creates a positive user experience both for end
users and those who've maintained the agent.
I hope to see you in the next episode for deconstructing
chatbots.
If you like this video and would like
to see more of such content, don't
forget to like and subscribe, as well as to check out
the helpful links I have listed in this video subscription.
Cheers, and thank you for watching.
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