Our thinking: Bot bedlam

Making a bot effective requires it to be built around a well-defined (and successful) business process. A good start is to identify which parts of interactions are best suited to automation and which require human intervention. Next, it’s helpful to map the attendant process flow. Just as any business processes which evolve over time to meet emerging demands change, both human and technical resources must keep pace. There must be a set of supporting processes in place to surface need, disseminate changes, re-train bots, and refresh datasets. Bottom line: if your business processes and human agents are delivering an inconsistent experience due to lack of understanding, knowledge, training or supervision, then there is little hope your bot can do any better.

Back-end system readiness will facilitate successful bot implementation. Technical management of bots can be a challenge, particularly when they have been deployed on an ad hoc basis by various lines of business. Likely, there are multiple platforms, systems, APIs and UIs in operation — some duplicative in task or function. Ideally, you can identify opportunities to share or reuse components to streamline automation applications across your organization. Job one is to get the big picture, examining where you have bots in place, their intended functions, how they are (or are not) performing and when they are triggered to interact with users. Evaluate their conformance to your organization’s technical infrastructure, standards and guidelines. Explore what data pipelines are in place to monitor usage, training data to improve customer experience. Consider how your bots are maintained and what technical support is needed.

How will your bot learn over time? Having metrics in place to track and assess performance is essential to long-term implementation success. You need systems in place to collect user feedback to better understand and improve the customer experience. You need easily used tools to teach the bot to understand more user language. Your business users can be great coaches. Listening to calls, they can provide insight into new questions and best answers. As subject matter experts, they can own jargon and the knowledge base of commonly encountered questions or requests, along with up-to-date, approved and effective responses. Their engagement is the fastest path to add new capabilities to your automated system. Bot developers can help too. Let them test and deploy new versions in a way that’s integrated with your IT processes.