Hello stranger! Say Hi to our new support chatbot.

3 mins read

Say hi to our brand new customer support chatbot

Hello there, stranger!

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Our brand new customer support chatbot tries to answer an existential question – Who are you?

For the last four years we had been thinking about introducing live chat support options for customers on our site.  But we kept on pushing it off because of resource, technology and internal issues. Chat support is an expensive proposition in the best of times and we simply didn’t have the resources to pull it off.

This June we finally kicked off the project to add chat support using chat bots with Amin Farid’s summer research project on conversation engineering.  I had been reading up on medium and I liked what I read. We were lucky that Amin and his class mates came by looking for an internship and we handed over the R&D for chatbots over to them. Like all summer projects we had our share of highs and lows and at quite a few points it felt as if the implementation effort was going to fail.

The last two months changed everything. All the hard work we had done finally came together. Amin’s project thesis was finally published. Our internal team found a slot of time that gave us the ability to review all the required Q&A and scripts prepared for bot learning.

Yesterday afternoon at 3 pm we rolled out the Beta version of our chat support bot online. We had been playing with her for the last week on our Facebook Fan page but decided it was time for her to say hello to the real world.

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Take her out for a spin on our Facebook Fan page to see how she handles difficult questions?

Drop in and say hello to our bot. From a conversation and learning point of view she is about a week old. But we hope that with regular customer interaction and feedback she will grow up quickly.

At this point of view the answer’s database is based on common questions we have received from our followers over the last five years. We hope that with the bot in place we will be seeing a lot more queries coming in and it will give us a chance to better respond to your issues as well help our bot grow more intelligent.

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Click on the blue chat window at the bottom right hand corner of your browser screen to access the support chatbot

You can play with her on the site by clicking on the small blue chat icon on the bottom right hand side of the screen (highlighted in yellow) or on our Facebook fan page by clicking on message.

Please use the bot to educate us about your needs, about questions we need to answer better, about challenges you face with the site. It is a great mechanism for letting us know how we can create a better and more fulfilling experience for all of our customers.

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Once the chat screen opens up type in your question. If she has the question in her training set, she will respond. If she doesn’t give you the correct answer, try again with just a keyword.  We are keeping an eye on unanswered questions and will keep on adding answers as we see you interact with her.

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A big hand and thank you to everyone who made this possible. Amin Farid for his original research on bot platforms and the conversation engineering challenge, the FAQ review based on the conversation engineering checklist and the initial training question and answer set.

Uzma and Agnes for adding to the original learning set and helping us think through conversation trees and maps. Fawzia Salahuddin for all her work with WordPress Integration, testing, implementing, hand holding and bot learning.

Sheikh Usama Noman and the brilliant Botsify team for their patience, support and an absolutely terrific platform that made childs work of the difficult task of rolling out an effective bot engine on both Facebook and WordPress in record time. I don’t think without Botisfy the product and Botisfy the team this would have ever happened. They put the pain out of providing context and intelligence to the bot out of the process. Thank you.

It is absolutely amazing what the NEST.io and PASHA Startup community has been able to achieve in the short span of eighteen months. Botsify is the second NEST.io company in two months to solve a real world problem for us as a business with a quality product and world class delivery. 

So, once more, here we go again. Hello stranger! Drop in and say hi.