WHAT? Chatbots Need Business Analysis?
A few years ago, my wife and partner Angela and I became involved with chatbots – you know, those sometimes annoying popups that are constantly begging to be activated (kind of like the one you see in the lower-right corner of this window).
It started when we decided it would help our customers if we added a chatbot to this site to help people find what they were looking for more quickly.
We spent several weeks researching the various chatbot options, both Artificial Intelligence / Natural Language Processing chatbots and the simpler rule-based versions. (OK, truth be told, my wife researched as only she can while I sat around looking intelligent and busy as only I can.)
How Was I Supposed to Know?
Sorry for the digression. At any rate, based on her research we opted for Landbot as a platform and started developing our rule-based bot.
That’s when we made a profound discovery.
You can’t develop a chatbot
without knowing what you want to give your visitors!
Talk about an eye-opener. I mean, we’ve only been teaching business analysis techniques for some 30-odd years; so how were we supposed to know that we needed to apply those techniques to a project to develop a chatbot. (Again, let me clarify: SHE wanted to do analysis but I thought it was such a simple thing, why bother thinking about it first? Wrong, as usual – me, of course).
To keep a long post from running away, we decided to take advantage of the stay-at-home time thanks to Covid-19 by revisiting our chatbot.
The result of applying solid business analysis and user experience design techniques to the process of developing a chatbot resulted in a new, improved version of our chatbot that we named BAXBY3.
Business Use Cases are a great tool to design conversational flow and chatbot structure.
An I-Opening Experience
Actually, the project was so much fun and successful that we ended up developing an entire new course about the process. The new course is titled “Landbot: From Designing a Conversation to Building a Chatbot” and is now available on Udemy.com.
We are presenting lean business analysis to get to business and user objectives and the structure of the chatbot. The User Experience (UX) messaging is based on neuro-scientific studies of how the human brain works when we make a decision.
Where Do You Go from Here?
Not that I would ever use neuroscience findings to take advantage of your decision-making processes, but in case you are interested in how business analysis turbo-charged chatbot development,
