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'We're on line now' or chatbots

David Knights Strategic Communications & Marketing Consultant at Knightshouse Ltd Posted 2 years ago

Interested to hear the experience of any charities that have implemented a 'speak to us now' type bot on their website or who have implemented a full on automated chatbot. We are thinking of a contact us online instant chat bot to reduce the number of phone calls which can be answered more quickly and efficiently with instant chat. But wondered whether this was also an opportunity for an automated 'ask me a question' type autobot when this is not available. Thoughts and experiences most welcome.

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Jon Stutfield Staff PANEL

Volunteer Digital Consultant at Various 2 years ago

Here's some thoughts and advice from someone in digital that's worked to develop chatbots in the past.

If you get asked the same simple questions over and over again, then a chatbot is great. But they can be a pain if the user is looking for something more complex, so I would always advise having an obvious option to 'speak to a human', even if this is just sending an email behind the scenes.

Unless you're going to invest a lot of time (and money) in this, you may be best avoiding a chatbot with open text - where the user can ask anything. These take a lot of work to get right, and you may just end up frustrating people. Instead, provide the user with a small tree network of simple questions and answers - along with the aforementioned 'speak to a human' option.

There are no-code tools out there that help people build simple chatbots, so give it a go and test it on colleagues to see if this technology is right for your org.

Cheers,

Jon

CEO, Bliss
Digital Director, Parental Engagement Network

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Adrian Thompson Staff PANEL

Founder at The Bot Forge 2 years ago

Hi David,

I run a conversational AI agency and we specialise in chatbots and voice assistants. We have worked on a number of chatbots for charity organisations which have been successful in reducing customer support demands and driving engagement.

You can read a bit more about the use-case here https://www.thebotforge.io/use-cases/charity-chatbot.
We receive regular enquiries from charities wanting to leverage the latest chatbot technology and every organisation is different and we advise accordingly on whether a chatbot would be a good fit.

Conversational experiences need to be created correctly to avoid frustration (as Jon S has mentioned, speak to a human is up there with the most important!) which means following conversation design practices and using the correct technology for the job. Current modern natural language technologies can enable the creation of very sophisticated chatbots.

Costs will depend on the scope and scale of the chatbots conversational capabilities. Other factors to consider are availability of training data, friendly testers, integrations needed, number of expected users, what channels are you going to use on (web, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, SMS, Google Assistant).

There are some free advanced conversational AI technologies which you can create chatbots with nowadays. These could be either cloud services such as Google Dialogflow or you can use an open source offering such as Botpress or if you want to go more technical https://airy.co/ or rasa. There are just a few of the popular ones, there are loads to choose from.

Another option would be to look at a livechat platform which integrates with a chatbot platform maybe Livechat/chatbot.

hope that helps

Adrian T

Founder, The Bot Forge

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Tess Linton Staff PANEL

Chief Executive at Borderline Support UK CIC 2 years ago

Hi David, we did trial one last year for a few months but it didn't work for our service users. We had an FAQ which matched some specific terms they put in, but our service users have complex conditions and the chatbot didn't really work well in that instance - I think it frustrated the service users more than anything. So we removed it and now they contact us through a form with their specific queries, which works better for us/them. I think a chatbot works well if they are for simple straightforward questions or just for the service user to leave contact details so you can get back in touch with them.

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Sanjana k Staff PANEL

at FRG 1 year ago

Tess Linton Hi! That's very insightful. Could you please tell me a bit about the chatbot you used?

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Rory Innes Staff PANEL

CEO at The Cyber Helpline 2 years ago

Hi David, our victim engagement model is based around having a chatbot as the front door and having an automated help process - with a volunteer helpline behind it for those that need more help. It allows us to help loads more people, support 24/7 and give people a way to get help without soeaking to someone. It has been a real success.

We built our own technology, as we wanted it to be able to triage cybercrimes and offer first response help. Happy to talk yu through it and share stats, costs etc. Just let me know.

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