Page 27 - The EDIT | Q3 2017

ASK THE EXPERT
An interview with Balazs Molnar
support, travel booking, concierge and mental health and the conclusion was always the same — the conversation interface is not efficient enough and the NLP was simply not sophisticated enough to make the Chatbot more useful than an app or a website. We went through the design process over and over again until we realized the issue: we were using very similar tools and approaches which are used to design a traditional mobile application
or a website. In some cases, the result was even worse because we tried to overcome the barriers of natural language processing (NLP) by inserting loads of buttons, unnecessary visual elements, and cards, which felt completely alien in the flow and the experience became very poor and complex.
To overcome these issues, we took a separate route and started the journey from the backend, taking the actual service itself and researching what was the absolute minimum effort and input that a Chatbot requires to achieve the highest quality of response. We basically took a command line interface (CLI) and tried to figure out how to reach similar or better efficiency with the pure command based inputs
that a graphical interface has. The results were exciting! This approach did
not only let us to understand
how to simplify Chatbots,
but it also gave us a much better understanding of the automation level we need to implement in the integration layers and back-end. This is a whole new creative canvas where an ideal designer
is a mix of a coder and copywriter. The magic is to
find the balance between the bot being simple enough to stay true to the conversation interface and solving a task.
“A good rule of thumb is to remember that nobody likes to read long chat messages — which is a challenge, but also a great creative opportunity.”
In what industries are Chatbots best utilized, and how can they function as an advertising channel?
Usually Chatbots are best utilized in sectors where there are high frequencies of queries and where there is a strong service based operation. For this reason, Chatbots are most effective in industries involving customer support, booking, shopping, and personal concierges. Additionally, Chatbots are also a great way to complement advertising, especially in industries where there is a strong lead qualification process. They contain a considerable opportunity
to better understand a potential customer by giving a natural extension to advertisements. We also
saw an increase in conversion rates when we lead advertisements directly to Chatbots — and as a
medium, it is a great way to retarget users or use data collected from Chatbots for more accurate and effective
advertisement retargeting.
How high is the accuracy of Chatbots?
In my opinion, most of the Chatbots are not very accurate. The reason for this is that their purpose
is not properly determined and they do not consider
the user journey. The same query can be asked in many
different combinations, and people can get very creative when
it comes to talking to a robot.
Continued over >
Discovery
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THE EDIT ISSUE 7 | Q3 2017