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How to develop truly conversational bots

Have you ever had a pleasant conversation with a bot? Chances are high that you have, as chatbots are getting smarter and better at helping us deal with the products we’re dealing with everyday.

Barcelona startup Caravelo is at the moment developing six chatbots for some of the biggest airlines in the world. The chatbots they build help millions of travelers to book and reschedule flights, provide customer service, act as personal concierges and much more.

Even though all their bots use NLU (natural language understanding), they’re not building their own solution, but are using existing NLU solutions to cope with all the different languages airlines need to speak with their customer, according to co-founder JoseLuis Vilar:

“If we would try to build an NLU solution for all the languages our client’s needs, we would be dead.”

Not replacing apps

Caravelo says beyond the hype, that the bots they’re building are not replacing apps, they just doing the same things very differently in terms of UX and UI, but also in terms of use cases.

“We won’t build bots for everything, only where it’s natural to have one.”

After being live with several chatbots for nearly 3 months, collecting thousands of interactions, they’ve already learned a lot of valuable lessons, the biggest being not ask the same questions over and over again.

According to the startup the distance between success and failure is quite short, so you need to get things right the first time around. And according to Vilar, even though the risk for failure is high, the reward for the customer when things go right is much higher.

Repeating answers is the worst a bot can do to a customer according to Caravelo.

Work on building a solid knowledge base

After tracking their bots conversations the latest months, Caravelo has found that 20 percent of the inventory of intents (Q&A’s) makes up around 80 percent of the total value. So you need to focus on that part first, building a really strong inventory to start all conversations, the right username and contact, pictures, etc.

The next 15 percent of value is based on the inventory of questions and answer (intents) where you need to build a solid knowledge base for your specific industry. In Caravelo’s case, they’ve built a database of 1000 FAQ’s related to the airline and travel industry, and this is based on interactions the airlines have had with their customers over the years.

The last five percent of value are from the questions a bot cannot answer, and the idea is this is the place where we get the human take-over, and a customer service agent will serve any remaining problem.

The three different categories of value provided to the customer, either by a bot or a human.

Key learnings

The most important learning Caravelo has done the last months is to avoid user loops, like shown in the pictures above. There are few things as annoying for a user to go through the same questions over and over again.

So far Caravelo’s solution to bugs like this one has been to build a small fix where the bot only can ask the same question a certain amount of times.

Caravelo co-founder and CIO JoseLuis Vilar.

Another key learning is to use, but not abuse the NLU (natural language understanding). So for example, today they have some answers that go through the back-end from their database, and some answers that go through the NLU, but they classify the easy answers, like affirmations, to not go through the NLU.

Just as with any product, the on-boarding of the user is crucial to keep people talking to the bots. In the case of chatbots, you need to tell them what you’ll be doing for them, and give the user clear options.

The last take-away the Caravelo team has learned over the course of using bots in real life, is to not take too much advantage of bot trainers (external services), as they’re not building a natural language understanding themselves, and it’s easy to get too dependent on them.

To get the full value of Caravelo’s learnings, take a look at the video at the top.

If you want to learn more, take a look at our latest podcast about the European VC industry:

https://blog.itnig.net/first-rule-of-talking-to-vcs-show-metrics-that-support-the-story-you-re-telling-3d31160db889

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Learning the Design to Code process

Even if you’e not a designer and never used design software before, you can still release products that do the job and are well designed.

The following steps I’ll guide you through can be divided into three parts:

  • Planning
  • Designing
  • Coding

It’s far from a complete UX process, but it will allow you to take your own design and make it come alive.

1. Plan it

In your initial phase of planning you need to know your goal, and what you want to achieve with your project.

When you know for what purpose you’e building your app or your product for, you need to know who’s using it.

You should think of your audience in three different ways.

>Who: Demographics, age, gender, profession, etc.

>Where: In what setting they will use your product in.

>What: The kind of device they’re using your product on.

Take this information and let it influence your decision as you design.

The next step is to do at basic flowchart, in other words see how the user goes through your product, step by step, instead of just hard-coding it.

When you make a flowchart you avoid making mistakes that forces you to go back and do big changes. An example of a flowchart I’ve used in Quipu is pictured under to give you a rough idea, but if you want to dig into it — here’s a video explaining the process using Sketch.

It’s extremely important to have a thorough plan for whatever product you’re designing. It will save you time and effort for sure.

The last part of the planning, is to define a functional definition of each page in your product. It’s a document that will be your documentation or knowledge base about what each screen does, what it shows, and what routes and actions are possible to take from there.

So if you’re building an app, you should have a page with the following information for each interface:

Name of the view (or the module) –> The purpose of the page –> Full information –> Partial information –> List information –> Routes/actions.

If you did your flowchart correctly, the documentation will be heavily dependent on that Flow Chart.

2. Design it

The most important thing as a fresh designer or working on a project you’ve coded yourself, is to use established patterns.

There’s no reason to reinvent the wheel again.

A place where you can find questions and answers for most issues are ux.stackexchange.com. It’s similar to stackoverflow.com, just for design, and we know how important that is to most designers, so don’t be afraid to seek inspiration and help from more experienced people.

Then start on your wire-framing. Translate your flow and functional definition to a low-fidelity screen that contain everything but the design finish. In other words, focus on getting all the routes, actions, buttons and content right before making it look nice.

One of the most important thing of the design process, is to design it like you would code it. I recommend using Sketch, but use whatever software you’re comfortable with, like Illustrator or Photoshop.

Design as you would code it simply means using non-filled transparent containers to imitate containers and wrappers. Also use naming conventions for layers and groups just as you would use while coding your components.

The last thing I want to mention in terms of design, is to use Atomic Design principles which is a way of designing interfaces that extends to what we’ve been covering in the “Design as you would code it” part above.

It talks about structuring your design, and define it into atoms (colors, fonts, shapes) and form molecules by using them (buttons, inputs, lists etc..), to finally do organisms. An organism then becomes a template For example, A navigation bar that has a menu, a search bar and a logo (few molecules).

Foto: http://bradfrost.com/blog/post/atomic-web-design/

3. Code it

As a designer I will not teach code, most of you probably are more talented coders than I am, so I’ll just mention the software you should use to help you get all the CSS styles you will ever need.

Zeplin.io is a software that takes Sketch Designs, exports CSS styles and gives you all the sizes, margins, paddings, borders you need in order to translate your design to code and not loose the quality and level of detail you worked so hard on.

Zeplin.io is in my opinion the best way to translate design to code.

If you followed the atomic design, and designing as you would code it, then this process is simple, quick and with minimum errors.

I can honestly say that in Quipu where I do the design, this is the most time-saving tool I’ve ever come across. It drastically reduced both cost and time spent on getting the looks of our apps and website translated to all browsers.

Also read:

https://blog.itnig.net/why-ux-ui-designs-should-be-aimed-at-zombies-1968d72b0472

This post was written by media manager at itnig, Sindre Hopland, based on the presentation by lead designer at Quipu, Kamil Jura.

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Demystifying the product manager, and how to become one

As product focus is more important than ever in building startups in a very competitive market, the product manager role is increasingly getting more common and is highly valued.

But to many it’s a job description that’s a bit vague, and often means different things from company to company.

We invited three product people from the startup ecosystem in Barcelona to discuss the topic: Former PM at Google and currently product consultant Itamar Gilad, CEO and co-founder of Factorial Jordi Romero, and CEO and co-founder of Quipu Roger Dobaño.

Long time product expert Gilad says it’s hard to explain the PM role in one sentence:

The position has changed so much over time, and it’s still changing. I like to define the PM as the person who’s the expert on the users, the customers, the market and the competition, and manages to deliver this context to the product team in a good way — it’s a super man basically!

From product to customer first

From the left: Sindre Hopland, media manager at itnig, Jordi Romero, CEO and co- founder of Factorial.

The last 10–20 years, tech companies have shifted their focus from trusting their engineers more than market, to lifting the customer and the users as the number one priority in making the product, says Gilad that for the last six years has managed products such as Gmail and Youtube:

The first time I heard the term product manager was back in the 90’s, and back then it was very new. The thought was that engineers always knew best, but that has changed a lot.

Also Romero, CEO of Factorial, recognizes the attitude from earlier times when he worked in other SaaS companies in the US and in Barcelona:

I remember we first defined ourselves as a product-first company, then a sales-driven startup and later a customer focused company. It think these terms are hard for startups that alter and change the way they do business often.

Dobaño is both CEO and head of product at accounting SaaS Quipu, he defined the product role like this:

You’re the CEO of the product, but it’s not just about making a great product, it’s about continuously solving problems for the customers and making an impact in your customers life.

All the responsibility, but no authority

The product manager is found somewhere between tech, business and the UX/UI team of the startup. © 2011 Martin Eriksson.

Even though the PM has the word manager in the title, all three guests agrees that the only thing the PM actually manage is the product itself.

Romero points to several challenges connected with this kind of responsibility:

An issue I’ve seen in many product teams, is that the PM is managing the team itself, and not only the product and process. I think this is a real problem that is hindering the communication in the organization.

Itamar explains that the PM is there to fill all the holes of work that aren’t being worked on, which means that the person needs to be diverse:

The PM is working closely with both customer service, the business side, designers and engineering, it’s more about creating a pattern for collaborations and a good flow of progress. It’s needless to say that soft skills are in high demand.

He continues to say that a startup needs a designated PM when the startup is at a scale where the business people and the engineering team start arguing what to build next, and you don’t have time as a CEO to deal with all the discussions.

How to become one

From the left: Itamar Gilad and Roger Dobaño.

Romero says he believes a lot in promoting PM’s within the company that share the original values and vision of the founders.

Itamar explains that it’s not necessary to know how to code, but many big companies require it:

In companies like Microsoft, Apple and Google they alway prefer someone with a coding background. However, the personal also needs to be interested in the business side of the startup and have strong soft skills for team management.

Dobaño thinks many companies are setting too high requirements for their PM’s:

What you’re describing here is a unicorn. I do agree that PM’s should have a computer science background, but my job is to empower one person within each product team, and I’ll then make sure the communication flow is good between the company.

Romero repeats how vital soft skills are to this profession:

To have all the technical skills is one thing, but to be able to both do a sales pitch and to convince the developer team that what they’re building is the right thing to focus on, that’s tricky.

This post was written by Sindre Hopland, media manager at itnig and produced together with Masumi Mutsuda.

https://upscri.be/285782-2

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Customers Go First — How To Improve Your Customer Satisfaction Score and Net Promoter Score

Many entrepreneurs, technologists and product managers will nod upon hearing this universal business truth: customers go first. In the end customers are the reason businesses exist, by adopting and paying for a company’s product or service.

The term “customer success” is a hot topic these days, and can mean various things, but below I’ll explain the term with the meaning — how your company interacts with customers to guarantee success for it after the interaction.

These five words and different topics are what we’ll try to identify in the text below (or the video above).

  1. Ask — Who, what and when to ask questions to improve your product.
  2. Listen — Summarize and organize the information and share it with the team.
  3. Measure — Connect trends with business objectives.
  4. Understand — Get insights from the information you’re receiving.
  5. Act — Make decisions to improve your product, service and customer experience.

CSAT

If you have a SaaS company or any kind of software company, you need to make sure the customers have a way to communicate with you.

In this communication, you need to think about what kind of user you want to open your lines of communication with, what kind of questions they should be answering and when they should do this.

The developers at itnig are trying to figure out what kind of features to focus on next to keep CSAT and NPS high.

To make sure your customers are happy, you should measure customer satisfaction rates (CSAT). You can rate it however you want, a normal way is by numbers, stars or faces with different expressions.

In SaaS products a good CSAT is 98 and above, and an acceptable score is 90. Everything else is bad. Because the customer usually is telling you what you’re doing wrong, it’s (usually) fairly easy to get a good score, just make sure you have a great customer service team, that’s key.

NPS

The juiciest part of the acronyms mentioned is Net Promoter Score (NPS).

It measures what kind of attitude your customer has towards your product. Only the 9th and the 10th best customers are promoters, which are the best customers you can hope for. These people will promote your product to people they meet. The neutrals in the middle, the 8th and the 7th, don’t do anything for you. And last, but not least, the detractors that represent the bottom 6 of your customer base. These people have a negative influence on your product or service.

To measure NPS you can use platforms such as Wootric, Delighted or Zendesk.

You don’t need to be a Mensa member to understand that getting a good score can be pretty hard, when 60 percent of the bar is detractors.

The formula is: NPS = % of promoters – % of detractors.

So if you have 20 percent promoters, 50 percent neutral, and 30 percent detractors, you’ll have -10 in NPS score, which is really bad.

Some NPS problems are simple to fix, you need to segment the customer base and try to solve as many of the recurring customer-issues as possible. Other NPS related challenges take longer time and need bigger and more drastic changes to fix. After segmenting the customers, you need to group the feedback into components of your product and service, and put your team to work on item after the other.

Companies that takes NPS scores seriously, aim at scores between 60 and 80.

https://upscri.be/285782-2

Listen, intensely and honestly

If you didn’t pick up that listening closely to your customer is extremely important, it’s time to note that done.

But listening and organizing the data isn’t enough alone. A customer that actually contacts you to give you feedback on your product or your service is valuable so make sure the people they speak to are understanding and empathic.

Don’t try to push other or cheaper products on a customer that contacts you about an issue. You have a valuable shot at solving important problems for your company, don’t ruin it by trying to sell them more stuff they don’t want.

To get any value from these processes, you need to share all the customer feedback with the team, not only to implement changes. You never know who might sit on solutions or ideas for improvement.

To get real life examples see the video above, where Jordi explains how Redbooth tackled some of their challenges with CSAT and NPS.

This post was transcribed by Sindre Hopland, media manager at itnig.

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How Playfulbet Grew To 400K Followers On Facebook And 300K On Twitter

Even though Playfulbet’s product is e-sports and sports betting games, our success in capturing thousands of users and followers has not been left up to chance.

Behind Playfulbet there’s a young team that first and foremost love what they do, as we get to work with our biggest passion — games. And it feels even better to share these insights when our devotion is bearing fruit, as our social media following have been growing exponentially the last few years.

We recently reached a couple of milestones in our social channels, as we reached 300.000 followers on Twitter and 400.000 followers on Facebook.

As mentioned earlier, nothing is left up to chance, and at times we’ve been overwhelmed by the massive growth from some of our campaigns, especially as Playfulbet has been expanding internationally.

LOVE

We love our followers, and have great respect for everyone that follow our social media channels. And here lies some of the key-elements to our growth, we have a big emphasis on entertaining our audience every single day.

It’s important to see you social media as an extension of your product, as our social channel is an extension of Playfulbet’s betting platform.

We focus on communicating with our audience, and not just broadcasting a message. In this we use all kinds of media tools like pictures, video, GIF’s, surveys and contests that can steal a smile or a reaction from our followers.

If you have a product to leverage through the platform, use it for what it’s worth. We give away our virtual money (Coins) that users can take advantage of on the platform to win prizes.

The precious feedback

To maintain a high interaction rate in your social channels is key to keep growing. As we are a sports betting platform we base a lot of our content on actual sports news. In that way we’re staying relevant to our followers, and not only entertaining. I think this is one of toughest nuts to crack — stay relevant.

If you’re interacting with your audience every day, you’ll be sure to get feedback, which is very valuable. It’s important that you follow up on all your feedback, as your brand will be more credible, and your followers will be more faithful if they feel they’re being heard.

Jorge Badenes, content manager at Playfulbet — an itnig startup.

Having depurated non-toxic social networks where the user feels comfortable also serves as a real time barometer of what’s going on in your company. At Playfulbet the users may ask for support about prizes they’ve won or they aspire to win, they report cheaters and people who don’t play clean by using multi-accounts, which are forbidden, or they simply alert us about canceled or suspended matches they want their coins back from. All of this is super helpful for our team, and makes our platform better.

Right now we’re engaging our followers all across Europe and in Southern America, giving away hundreds of prizes every month, while creating entertaining content. Follow us for some inspiration on how you can do the same, because our team rocks!

Playfulbet, the adventure continues..

………….

This post was written by Jorge Badenes, content manager at itnig startup Playfulbet.