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ChatBots – Tale of two unique usecases

Conversational interfaces are a new bread of modern, effective and appealing technology trend that has lots of potentials for serving customers unlike ever before. But only when designed well. The technology involves Artificial Intelligence (and at times Machine Learning). The design challenge is as much to design an effective communication (i.e. ‘voice & tone’), as mush as it structure the content that besieges the entire experience.

This case study presents a two case where an effective information architecture, taxonomy and user experience design creates two unique solutions that embodies the top notch AI/ML thinking. This case also provides a foundation for unified design across various channels — mobile, web or voice bases user interfaces.

Case 1: Conversational interface design for a Travel Agency.

The concept utilizes the design that caters to engaging the users on a conversations by asking questions that provides them recommendations for Hotels, Flights and Car Rentals. This interface also helps users pick the optimal travel plan and does the booking without much ado.

 

The same ‘Bot’ that helps users with the conversational interfaces (on web & mobile) interfaces also engages them via email conversations.

Case 2: Designing Conversational Interfaces to help improve customer service

Most of the service content available today involves content that are either curated in terms of articles, pages or indexed with the meta data to be discovered with search. This possess few new challenges that we have identified recently — people with immediate need do not come to the landing pages nor they are able to search to find the correct information. Most of them expect google to give them good answer. This is the reason Google is building conversational content within their search result.

For large content sites, service content is a big source of customer dissatisfaction and often reflect the limitation of organizing content for browse and search. This has given rise to the idea of conversational interfaces to bring about the best matched content to the users. This conversational design method helps deflect unnecessary calls but also connects users to the live agent when required.

This was the underlying principle behind designing and developing proof of concept for one of the most trafficked Government Agency in the World.

The goal is to help customer find answers, navigate to the right content or connect withe the human agent via Conversational User Interface. These interfaces are modern and caters to mobility. Users can initiate the conversation on desktop or from a mobile pone without any drop in experience.

Chat-bots are programmable interfaces to help users meet their goals. Over time they can learn with the help of Natural Language Processing (NLP) & Machine Learning (ML/AI)

In our context, Chat-bots adds a greater appeals to FAQs and Interactive Tax Assistant (ITA) topics. Chat-bots can always help user connects with the Phone Support or subject matter experts based on a geographic location. Chat-bots are especially suitable to the context of mobility and users who expects quick answer from anywhere, anytime. Chat-box are also effective tools to unify various channels — online, call center, and regional offices to help serve the diverse customer base. Chat-box are a great solution for our content problem. They are also a natural transition towards futuristic Voice Enabled Interfaces.