Hi @kullykaur, Although I can’t speak for your situation precisely as each organisation will have different authentication requirements, a good rule of thumb to follow would be that whatever your agents need to do to authenticate a user, you should replicate with your Virtual Agent (Bot).
Of course, there are other ways to authenticate when using a Web Chat that you may want to consider, such as having the user log in before carrying out certain tasks or launching the chat.
The key thing to understand is what your bot can/can’t do. By this, I mean, what systems can it integrate with to complete authentication? What data can it enter and validate? Do you want to automate this, or are you looking to pass the user through to an Agent and remove automation altogether? You should certainly look to ask these questions before jumping into creating and designing a Bot.
To help you get started in planning your Bot, I recommend you follow a process a little like this:
- What use case are your users looking to achieve?
- Playout this interaction between someone who plays the user and another Bot (use something like Teams or WhatsApp), and freely chat as you would normally. - Not only does this help you identify sticking points within the Bot flow process, but it’s also a great way to get sample dialogue ready for your Bot.
Do this second point a couple of times with different sets of people to ensure you have plenty of coverage for the use case. Ideally, pick people unfamiliar with the process to play the users. Explain the use case and what the users want to achieve from the interaction (e.g., checking the rent balance). The person playing the Bot should know what they need to ask (authentication questions, such as account number and name) and what they need to say (any regulatory information, and so on).
From that, you can create your Bot with a sample script (which should be quite close to the final copy after a few rounds of this roleplay) and test it with another set of users to see how they find the experience.
A Key thing to remember is not to worry about covering every possible outcome; you should be looking for the “happy” flow, and you can then focus on the edge case options later. Typically, 80% of your users should be going through 20% of your flows, which is the core area you should focus on to create a great user experience. The other flows will come from the edge cases, which will happen more over time to ensure you cover as much of your user base as possible (this can be a simple case of passing over to a human to resolve).
I hope this has helped and guided you in getting started with the wonderful world of Bots. Do reach out if you have any questions; I’d be happy to discuss what you are looking to do and how best to achieve it. I would also like to see your finished Bot, as I love seeing what our customer base can do with the technology.
Kind Regards.
Jonathan Redsell