Chatbot Development for the Masses

The Bot Chronicles S01E04

If Lego Technics is for the big boys, Chatfuel would be best described as the Lego DUPLO series. Which is good, since I don’t know how to write code. A tool that brings (basic) bot creation to the masses. So I went ahead and created a companion bot to this Bot Chronicles Series!

Meet Ref-it (due to powers beyond my own it is now called Frankie. Helas.), our very own Chatbot:

Go ahead and give it a test-run. Read on if you’re interested in how the bot was created.
Note: you’ll get the best experience by clicking this link on a mobile device that has the Facebook Messenger client installed.

Why prototype out in the open?

Why toy around with this bot? And why put it out there at all? Because we have to. Theory is nice, but no better way to understand a new medium then to dive right into it. Play with it, expose it and get valuable feedback by real people. And so I did.

Just to be clear here. This is not a demonstration of our technical ability to create bots. Nor is this our true R&D Proof of Concept.
This is my preparation and discovery before our real preparation and discovery. How very meta.

What does it do?

I started the bot with three main goals in mind.

1. Act as acompanionbot to the Bot Chronicles Series. A bit like a sidekick to which I can link to in this series and the other way around.
2. Tell thevisitora bit more about The Reference and what we do.
3. Allow forgetting in touch withThe Reference, preferably by plugging directly into our CRM system.

The end result

I’m pretty happy with the way the bot turned out. The approach for creating the bot was very hands on, and Chatfuel allows people without mad coding skills to get something up and running quickly.

Introduction

Like any bot I decided to have the bot introduce itself. I kept it quite basic and immediately provided the visitor with three important choices. Learn more about what the bot can do, go to the bot chronicles section or get help.

Help

A quickly learned a “Help” section is not something to overlook. My wife (my favorite test subject for these things) kept tapping the images in the galleries instead of the buttons below. This has nothing to do with my wife not being tech savvy, she is (hi hon). Turns out, most people hit the images instead of the links below. Learned something there.
So I set out to extend the help section and make it into an onboarding experience where the visitor is guided in an interactive fashion through a couple of functions.

•working with links •explaining “galleries” •getting to the menu

•…