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Perfecting the Chatbot Fallback Experience
Nailing the most important chatbot flow you’ll ever create
Unfortunately, you’re not psychic and neither is Dialogflow 🔮
Hopefully, at this point in your chatbot journey, you’ve come to the realization that trying to predict user utterances for a given intent is about as hard as predicting the weather in San Francisco. Note the ‘about as hard’ as I’m sure there’s a lot of San Franciscans out there that would love to debate me on that.
San Francisco weather aside, if you’re pinning the success of your chatbot on predicting the endless options of utterances that your chatbot users could come up with, you’re bound for failure. Not only is this a fool’s errand, but it’s highly unlikely that this approach will be scalable for long-term chatbot endeavors.
So let me get this straight… You want to ‘undo an upgrade’? 😕
Feel free to take a few moments to let that subtitle fully sink in. No that’s not a typo, ‘undo an upgrade’ was an actual user utterance that I found in Dashbot.
This poor chatbot user was actually trying to figure out how to downgrade to TurboTax Free, but they ended up hitting the chatbot’s fallback flow because that was never added as an utterance to the appropriate intent. Not a single member of our team expected a user to ask how to downgrade in this manner.
Chatbot User: 1
Dialogflow : 0
Admitting defeat is no longer an acceptable fallback experience 🤦
If you think something along the lines of “I’m sorry but I don’t know the answer to that. Try asking me something else.” is an acceptable chatbot fallback experience you’re dead wrong. It’s 2019 and your chatbot users expect far better.
Your chatbot fallback experience needs to provide some sort of value to the end user that helps them either find the answer they’re looking for or garner a better…
