Today’s guest on Conversations That Matter is a chatbot connoisseur and conversational AI champion who helps businesses leverage AI to drastically improve their customer service. He’s lent his skills as a consultant to a number of companies in the retail and banking industries. When he’s not busy building bots, he leads an online community for all things conversational AI. Welcome to the show, Co-Founder of Botrepreneurs, Barend Jungerius! Barend joined host Randy Ksar for a livestream discussion on the challenges of implementing chatbots, the difficulties of working with conversational data, and how he started Botrepreneurs.

Takeaways:

• While implementation of bots is getting faster and faster, it’s not a magic process. Effective implementation is a multidisciplinary project that still needs a lot of manual work, brainstorming, and time.
• When building a chatbot, you need to start simple. While it is tempting to address every use case you can think of, you’ll quickly run out of resources. Start small with a strong data foundation, and build from there.
• When you have more than one team member writing dialogue for a bot, you can easily end up with different styles and voices. Creating bot personas that detail the wording that should be used will help keep work consistent.
• Botrepreneurs was born out of a need for community within the conversational AI space. As the field is relatively new, it can be tough to find resources. Having online communities allows for effective sharing of knowledge and creation of best practices.
• Designing good chatbots requires good data, but the data itself often is a hurdle as conversational data is complex, and not confined to regular data fields. The best way to organize your data is to sort it into topics and reasons for the customer reaching out.
• While communities are great as a support tool for their members, they need to be about more than just work. In person events with fun activities are a great way to keep communities engaged.
• Communities are built on strong conversations. It’s important to talk to your members and share their stories and experiences. Each conversation two people have with each other strengthens their relationships, and increases the degree of help they can provide.

Shoutouts

• Jim Rowe: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jimrowebot/
• Martyn Redstone: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mredstone/

Quote of the Show:

• “Start small, think big.” - Barend Jungerius

Links:

• Twitter: https://twitter.com/BarendJun
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bjungerius/
• Website: https://www.botrepreneurs.live/

Ways to Tune In:

• Apple Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/conversations-that-matter-podcast-for-contact-center/id1525650658
• Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6Xx9G8w6bntQayIpbkgxc5?si=cNeVuJicSHagsftlpL8-tg
• Google Podcast: https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9jb252ZXJzYXRpb25zdGhhdG1hdHRlcnBvZGNhc3QubGlic3luLmNvbS9yc3M