Building our first bot
Spending less time on processes and more time helping people
We’re working to give everyone at Citizens Advice easy access to the information, knowledge and tools they need to do their jobs.
To do this, we’re:
- replacing our intranets with better designed and easy to find resources, and
- rolling out Workplace by Facebook to help us share knowledge across the service.
We’re also testing how bots could help us achieve our aim too.
Using bots for work
Chat bots automate content in a way that feels like a conversation.
We’re used to — or at least getting used to — companies using bots, like the TfL TravelBot or Cleo, to make it easier to find the information their customers need.
We’re now seeing organisations create bots for their staff on Workplace — automating mundane and repetitive tasks to save people time when they’re at work.
We wanted to see how we could use bots to help our staff find the information they need to do their jobs — so we can spend less time on the small things (internal processes) and more time on the big things (supporting our national and local services to give people the knowledge and confidence they need to find their way forward).
Last month, we designed, built and launched 2 bots to our staff on Workplace — picking 2 low-risk situations to test out:
- Review bot — a survey bot to get feedback on Workplace, for people to share their experience and ideas
- Staff conference bot — the go-to place for information about our staff conference
Together, they sent out almost 9000 messages to our staff and both received over 90% positive feedback.
“Staff conference bot told me everything I needed to know!”
How to build a bot
We’re still learning about how to build bots. There are lots of different ways to do this, depending on the type you’re making, who you have to work on it and what tools you have access to.
We were able to bring together a mini multi-disciplinary team at Citizens Advice to design the bots — and used The Bot Platform to help us build them.
Here’s how we did it…
Understanding the problem
It’s easy to fall into the trap of making a bot that tries to do and solve everything. But if you try and make it do all of the things, it will end up doing a lot of things not very well. It’s important to keep it simple.
Instead of getting distracted by all the tasks we could try and get our staff conference bot to do, we focused on what one problem it could fix.
In the week running up to the conference, the events team’s inbox starts to overflow with questions — from ‘how do I get to the venue?’ to ‘ what time should I arrive?’
We wanted to see how we could automate some of these conversations, to make the content easier to find and save time for the team during one of their busiest periods of the year.
Working with subject matter experts
We hosted a couple of workshops with the events team, asking them to write down everything people needed to know. We themed them in 5 key areas — agenda, before staff conference, location and venue, lunch and staff awards — which later formed the core structure of the staff conference bot.
We then took time to think through how our users might want to receive the information — people want to know how to get to the venue, but did they just want the address or directions on how to get there from different stations?
Designing the conversation
The most important part of building a bot is designing the user experience.
For our review bot, we had questions we’d used in previous surveys. We knew we needed to ask people things like. ‘How useful do you find Workplace?’. But if we just put these into the bot and pressed play, we’d just be using a different tool to do the same tired survey.
We designed the conversation, changing the tone depending on the answer or asking different questions all together.
So if staff said they never used Workplace, they didn’t have to waste time answering questions that weren’t relevant. If they said they didn’t find it useful at all, we asked more questions to find out why — and see how we could improve their experience.
Test early and fail fast
It’s been a sharp learning curve, and failing fast early in the process helped us develop our bots before they went live.
How we failed:
- The review bot at first was a bit too friendly and assumed people knew how to talk to it
- The staff conference bot was trying to guess all the questions staff might have, instead of giving them the information they needed upfront
So we:
- Changed the tone of the review bot before it went live and added instructions for people using it for the first time
- Redesigned the staff conference bot to give people information they needed before prompting them to ask any other questions they had.
Have a bit of fun
We’re creating bots for work, to do serious things like giving staff the tools they need to do their job.
But, we’re also all human. Surprising and delighting people can make a big difference to engagement.
What next
We know we can make bots that work. So now we want to automate processes and mundane tasks — seeing how bots can help important functions of our organisation, like finance.
Over the next year we’re working colleagues to design them, using The Bot Platform to build them.
Bots won’t solve everything, and they’re not everyone’s cup of tea. But if they’re problem focused and thoughtfully designed, they could save us significant amounts of time on the small things, so we can focus on the big picture.
If you want to following our progress, follow us on Twitter and here on Medium.
