Conversational Forms — How to turn static Adaptive Cards into great User Experience using Power Automate

Our latest implementation (fully integrated, automated and smart Chatbot Project Estimator) required us to refactor our CRM Bot platform to enhance the form booking capabilities.

Our goal with Chatbot Estimator Form is simple — to give our clients the ability to quickly and easily estimate their next Chatbot project. In order to do that we have designed a simple form that:

• Collects some basic user data
• Analyses the industry, use cases and launch strategy
• Gathers the usage information
• Provides accurate licensing breakdown and high-level project scope overview
• AND IT LOOKS GREAT! ??

Who said forms have to be boring?

When you think about it, forms are not necessarily that much different to chatbots. In both applications, you are essentially looking to fulfil similar aims:

• Your main goal is to collect and process data from your user, usually following some sort of authentication pattern
• You want the user to be focused on a question at a time, and follow a logical process to its completion
• You want to be able to steer the “conversation” into the pattern you are in control of, and ensure the user experience is as quick and efficient as possible
• You want to augment your “replies” or “questions” with easy to navigate controls that seamlessly “do the job”

That’s why at CRM Bot we took our standard Web Chat display and turned it into a fully mobile-optimised, “one-question-at-a-time” form generator, using adaptive cards and Power Automate behind the scenes.

How we turn boring Adaptive Cards into a great looking Conversational Form

Each transition is a separate Container in your Adaptive Card. We’re really pleased with the flow…

How do we generate a great user experience with our forms?

• We use modals to ensure that the UX is adapted to all screens/resolutions/sizes
• We use Adaptive Cards (with as many Containers within a Card as necessary) and show each Container as a separate “form step”. We have also added several new controls to the framework — sliders, process bars, file uploads and address lookups (to name a few…)
• This allows the user to focus on answering just that one question at a time!
• We really focused on accessibility, by design all our controls are fully keyboard-friendly. You can go through the entire journey with just your keys
• We always use client-side validation to ensure fields are answered correctly (numbers only, email, even names can easily be “regexed”)
• Anytime there is an opportunity to introduce dynamic content or route the user into a specific pathway, we instigate a call to our Power Automate connector to handle the business logic

One of the key differentiators between our approach and your standard Forms software is our unique capability of injecting business logic between one question and the next. Let’s have a look into what that means in practice.

Dynamic Content Generation

In our Chatbot Project Estimate form (if you want to give it a go, just click on “Make it Happen” on our main page!) after collecting some details about your industry, we will adapt the remaining questions to match your input parameters and save on the clutter. Not only we will adapt the answers, but also adjust the labels and error messages and even inject some video testimonials to guide the estimation process.

Because you have selected Audio Bot as one of your chosen channels, we can then show you relevant content from our extensive library of Showcase Demos

And because we are, after all, a conversational company, everything we do is infused with our NLP processes — meaning we can extract added meaning, sentiment analysis, contextualise and so much more.

Quote in real-time

Customers these days do not want to wait a day or two for your license estimate. That is why we have integrated our Dynamics 365 for Sales application with our Estimate your Project form to offer you direct quoting capabilities. All you have to do is tell us:

• How many customers are you expecting to use a chatbot on a monthly basis
• How often will they interact with a chatbot per month

We will take these inputs, send the data to D365 for Sales, generate a new Opportunity, apply products, currencies, discount lists and generate your bespoke quotation without any human interaction whatsoever.

The customers are benefitting from real-time quoting, thanks to our Power Automate fulfilment

Estimate Chatbot Project costs

After you know what license you need, the next step is to estimate how long it will take to get you started. In order to do that, we just need to know some important parameters:

• What channels you want to launch on
• What use cases interest you mostly
• What features would you be needing for Day 1
• How many Line of Business systems you are planning to integrate

Asking these questions upfront allows us to generate some high-level estimate of our project scope, which we promptly return to you with our set of assumptions. All of this is then combined into a single Opportunity Proposal document and dispatched to a user (following an internal sales review).

It’s really as simple as that!

Using Approval Flows in the pattern is really a good fit — they allow us to keep the Sales Team informed, send push notifications, offer escalation/reassignment and allow interactivity which is necessary to make the whole process work. For an in-depth review of Approval Flows, follow this link.

And that’s pretty much it for forms! For more information on CRM Bot, please go here, or here, or here. Or just go ahead and ask us for a project estimate, you’ll be surprised how cost-effective our solutions really are!

This article appeared first on the CRM Bot blog at https://medium.com/crm-bot/