Top Tips for Conversational AI Training

Conversational AI agents (including chatbots, virtual assistants, robots, and more) are becoming even more pronounced in our daily lives and business operations. More and more companies are looking to enhance customer engagement while simultaneously reducing costs; thus, they are investing in conversational AI capabilities.

Over the next few years, the conversational AI industry is expected to grow by over 20% per year. Gartner even predicts that by the end of 2025, organizations that actively utilize AI in their customer engagement strategies will increase their operational efficiency by 25%. 

With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the use and expectations of conversational AI agents have increased significantly. Their service has been vital to businesses who began navigating through a new virtual reality while trying to remain engaged and connected with their client base. 

Conversational AI enables companies to overcome an impersonal barrier that a virtual world is known for and helps businesses provide a personalized, humanized, and tailored experience for their customers. These changes help brands redefine their customers' experiences even in an overly digitalized world. 

Training conversational AI agents to handle real-world applications can be a challenge. Human speech and its patterns are incredibly complex tasks. AI must understand multiple languages, accents, slang, pronunciations, and other aspects of variability. This task requires a vast vocabulary and conversational data of the highest quality. 

The problem is that much of this data contains useless, noisy, and often irrelevant information that must be sorted through to find the most helpful, critical information for training purposes.

Properly trained conversational AI agents can help boost your business in various ways, including streamlining customer service processes, reducing service time for customers, and saving money for the organization overall. Below, we go over some tips and tricks for properly training your conversational AI agent to make it the best it can be!

Define the Uses of Your AI Agent

First, it is essential to define the problems or tasks you want your conversational AI agent to solve or handle. Some businesses make a detailed list of the aspects they want their AI-powered bots to do. However, it may be a better idea, to begin with defining a specific problem you want your agent to solve. Doing this first will automatically enhance the efficiency of your bot and start with the right foot first when boosting your business processes. DRUID-built bots offer solutions for a variety of areas including banking, human resources, healthcare, insurance, and retail. They can offer assistance for your sales team, HR teams, and managers as well. 

Define Your Intentions

Your conversational AI agent must understand what your customers want and learn how to deliver a pleasurable experience. Clearly define your intentions to prevent communication issues in the future. If you want your bot to help customers complete purchases, you can include that as an intention. You should utilize the "#" to assist in identifying the intention. 

Include Multiple Variances in Speech

Your conversational AI agent will be even more effective if you include as many possible sample variations of speech or utterances as possible. Input as many different expressions as you can to round out intentions one at a time. This ensures that the utterances are knowledgable and representative of the world's many languages. Iterations should be included as well. Both the iterations and utterances should be updated regularly to avoid being outdated. 

Make Sure that Your Utterances are Purposeful

Choose your utterances and iterations carefully and choose the ones that have the most valuable information. These words and phrases should carry meaning. This way, they are actively extracting meaningful and relevant information from your customers. It is a good idea to use more than one word in the phrases chosen so that your agent will not be confused.

Add a Human Touch

By human, we mean personality. Your conversational AI agent should be able to communicate effectively with your customers. It would be beneficial to find the best fitting personality and tone of voice that best represents your brand. You can train your AI-enabled agent to be fun and engaging while still professional.

Utilize As Many Team Members As Possible During the Training Process

Your bot will be able to handle a variety of tasks. It is a good idea to allow your conversational agent to be tested by various departments or teams. Don't just let one team test it out; it is helpful for the entire team and entire company (including customers). Diversify your training team to ensure that any potential questions are asked and answered adequately in various ways. It will allow your team to train your AI agent more efficiently and to supercharge employee engagement!

Incorporate Media Elements 

Your conversational AI agent should actively engage with your customers; only text cannot achieve this. Integrating other components like web views, cards, buttons, and other interactive elements will help drastically. These components will allow your user to have the best experience with your business and your conversational AI agent. Also, these elements will help increase your sales, especially for online retail companies. Incorporating features like calls to action (CTA) functions and other recommendations will make it much simpler for your customers to locate and purchase relevant products.

Continuously Train

Once your bot is active, you may think the work is done; but think again. The training process is an ongoing one. You should always seek to improve your conversational AI agent if you want success to be constant. Monitor your bot, see what is working and what isn't, improve and train in areas lacking engagement or other aspects. By making the training continuous, you will be able to get the most out of your AI-powered bot and warrant success for your business. This will also help you learn and add new intentions for your bot.

Looking Towards the Future

While these tips and tricks are meant to be helpful, it is evident that training and building your perfect conversational AI agent is a tedious and complex process. Many challenges include capturing data, determining what data is useful and what isn't, imitating human language, and more. Designing your bots to capture relevant information and high-quality data and offer the best customer experience possible is crucial. 

The value of conversational AI agents is obvious but requires an investment from your business regarding time, money, and development processes. Training and improving never stops and will always get better with more involvement from your team and customers. Keeping a close eye on your bot and its functionalities will vastly improve your business.

Druid helps companies to build their conversational AI agent successfully. We can help every step from design to full implementation to navigating through the seemingly complex data collection process. Connect with us below to see our bots in action and learn how to help your business grow.