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Home ›› Artificial Intelligence ›› Analysis Of The Gartner Chatbot Deployment Guide

Analysis Of The Gartner Chatbot Deployment Guide

by Cobus Greyling
3 min read
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This deployment guide places significant emphasis on the Intent-Driven Design and Intent-Driven Development of a chatbot. The starting point to creating a chatbot is knowing and understanding the customer’s intent in order to create a chatbot that is seamless, customer-centric and above all, trusted.

Introduction

The Gartner Chatbot Deployment Guide provides practical insight into the state of play of chatbot implementations. And what measures can be taken to improve the chances of success of an implementation.

10 key takeaways from the report:

1.Chatbot teams must focus more on customer intent, rather than technology features and metrics like containment.

2. A lack of focus on intents leads to poor user experience. Customer conversations and utterances do exist from current customer care interfaces like IVR, email, etc. These utterances/conversations can be used for creating intent clusters that are semantically similar.

Analysis Of The Gartner Chatbot Deployment Guide

3. When designing a chatbot, companies mistakenly focus on selecting the right technology with attention on feature matrixes and comparisons, instead of focussing on the use-cases and which use-cases to cover. When the intent based use-cases are defined, the technology choices will be much easier.

4. Due to use-cases not being clearly defined, the dependancies of the use-cases are neglected, and this in turn leads to delays.

Analysis Of The Gartner Chatbot Deployment Guide

5. The use-case selection is also important in the sense that it determines the complexity of the implementation project. Failure to define the use-case leads to bad planning and budget complications.

6. According to Gartner, chatbot deployment costs can range from $50,000 to a few million U.S. dollars, depending on the use-case and the technology stack applied.

Analysis Of The Gartner Chatbot Deployment Guide

7. The use-case will also determine if the implementation is a low, medium or high fidelity solution.

8. AI must be used in conjunction with chatbot technologies to solve for customer intent in order to achieve business goals.

Analysis Of The Gartner Chatbot Deployment Guide

9. Customer intent must be aligned with business intent and needs to be decomposed to a low level.

10. When selecting use cases, choose the low-hanging fruit to give your chatbot the best chance of a successful deployment. Good use cases are high-volume, low-complexity, assisted-service inquiries, etc. Only once low-complexity use-cases are successfully implemented, review and prioritize the medium to high-complexity use-cases for deployment.

Analysis Of The Gartner Chatbot Deployment Guide
Source

In the next two years, 38% of organisations are planning to implement chatbots — a 40% increase in the adoption of chatbot technology.
~Gartner

Analysis Of The Gartner Chatbot Deployment Guide

Customer Centricity In Chatbot Design

The chatbot design and workflow must be based on customer intents. The customer journey must dictate the chatbot functionality.

The chatbot flow needs to be:

Seamless — Understanding customer intent is key to customising the chatbot flow.

Customer-intent-specific content — Relevant and personalised content provides direction to the customer and conveys the notion that the organisation knows the user and cares.

Trust — Low-effort but highly secure authentication and authorisation mechanisms improve customer trust.

Analysis Of The Gartner Chatbot Deployment Guide

Consideration needs to be given to identify key stakeholders, supporting technology, operations, business requirements, security, risk, compliance, and data analytics, together with chatbot technology vendors.

The dependency list is a critical input for staffing and expertise requirements, estimating the cost, the implementation timeline, and the overall success of the chatbot deployment and continuous improvement. Gartner advises that organisations conduct this exercise in the initiation phase before committing to specific deployment timelines.

Conclusion

The popular approach to chatbot projects is to start with technology and compiling a comparison matrix for features.

Once the technology is determined, organisations work backwards to implement this technology. And determining the intents is very much a guessing game.

For successful chatbot deployment, analyze and define the chatbot applicability to the customer journey, and design the chatbot workflow based on customer intent.
~Gartner

Gartner emphasises that an organisation needs to start with defining user intents, followed by business intents. And subsequenlty create alignment between the user intents and the existing business intents.

Analysis Of The Gartner Chatbot Deployment Guide

User intents can be gleaned from existing user conversations like agent conversation transcriptions, IVR recordings, emails, etc. These user utterances can be clustered using embeddings. The clusters will be collections of semantically similar user utterances, hence constituting intents.

Subsequent use-cases can be defined, with CX goals. Making a technology choice at this stage makes much more sense, and how the chatbot will fit into the enterprise ecosystems. Dependancies are often related to integration for supporting API’s and medium integration. Mediums refer to where the chatbot will be surfaced, be it SMS, WhatsApp, Messenger, etc.

And lastly, select low-complexity use-cases that preferably generate revenue and save costs. Or high-volume, low-complexity, assisted-service inquiries, and lastly high-complexity use cases where a chatbot can be leveraged to augment assisted channel services.

post authorCobus Greyling

Cobus Greyling

Cobus Greyling holds 4 tertiary qualifications, including a Post-Graduate diploma from the University of Pretoria in GIS. Over a period of more than 20 years he has visited 19 countries, and has worked in 5 countries, with 8 GSM networks, and more than 18 companies. Being involved with self-service in 14 languages on various platforms relating to IVR (inbound, outbound, ASR and Speech Synthesis), Voice Biometrics, Conversational Interfaces (Amazon Echo, Google Home, Chatbots), Cognitive Computing, Linguistic Analysis and Ambient Computing. Cobus has experience in the areas of training, development, project management, and executive overviews and presentations.

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Ideas In Brief
  • The Gartner Chatbot Deployment Guide provides practical insight into the state of play of chatbot implementations.
  • The author points out 10 key takeaways from the report in the article.

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