Launch your first chatbot with KCS!

The most talked-about support capability of this year is going to be Chatbots. Considering the popularity of chatbot in the consumer world, customers see it as a default option in any support site. A successful chatbot program in a Hi-Tech or B2B environment requires a lot of training, customization, and integrations, making it an expensive experiment considering the maturity of the solutions (Currently they are no more than glorified search engines).

Based on our experience at Hashout, we suggest that you start your chatbot journey by integrating an inexpensive, off the shelf chatbot solution with your KCS knowledge base to deliver a functioning bot.

While it is easier said than done, you could go from "What is a chatbot?" to "My chatbot is working!" in a matter of weeks, with just two minor changes to your article template.

1. Add a new field to your article template to update Chat variations (Utterance) of a specific issue. By default, it should have the article title. This will be searched by a chatbot to locate relevant articles. When a new variation is identified chatbot adds it here.
2. Add Chat resolution (Response) field to the article template; this is used to author a crisp chatbot version of the article resolution. Below are some best practices to consider when authoring chat responses,

• Keep the answer to less than 100 words. Use bullets or break lengthy solutions into multiple short messages. This will improve readability.
• Wherever possible, provide a link to the detailed process instead of the actual process.
• Use GIFs in place of multiple screenshots.
• Embed videos to illustrate complex processes/troubleshooting steps.
• To begin with, you can also consider auto-filling this field by combining Title, Summary, and Link of the article. Later revisit the top used article to write custom chat solutions. Tip: Use 80:20 to identify top content and have chat solution written only for them during launch.

With the right integrations, these two changes should let your chatbot solution, look up the article related to the customer's issue and suggest a resolution that is crisp and consumable on a chat screen.

Of course based on the success and adoption, one could decide to invest in a comprehensive solution, team, and integrations.

HashoutTech is a Salesforce, Adobe and LMI Partner with expertise in handling end to end implementation and integration for Service Cloud, Community Cloud, Chatbots and Adobe Experience Manager.

*Knowledge-Centered Service (KCS?) is a registered Trademark of the Consortium for Service Innovation?.