After our first month of deployment, we wanted to take a moment to reflect on the COVID chatbot resource that our team launched with HR.com. Like many organizations, our team had to quickly pivot to ensure we stayed true to our mission of helping teams do their best work.
When HR.com approached us with the opportunity to work together, we were able to rapidly leverage our platform to get it up and running in only 48 hours. This included conceptualization, research, generating content, and deploying on multiple websites with multiple clients. In the scramble, our team has uncovered some powerful trends and gained some valuable insight to accompany the free resource we’re offering.
Great insight via trends.
One of the biggest takeaways from the COVID bot resulted from observing how the questions changed week to week. In the beginning, the majority of the questions revolved around the best ways to protect yourself from the virus. Over time, as shown in the graph below, more and more questions were raised about the state of business and economy.
Seeing the topic trends evolve is interesting because it clearly shows what users care about and what content would best meet their needs. The word cloud below shows the skills and questions that users asked for the most. While it’s important to understand what people are asking during a pandemic, it’s equally important to monitor what your customers, employees, or users ask day-to-day. Without this information, it’s extremely difficult to adapt your business to meet changing demands.
Seeing how users’ interests change week-to-week on one topic is extremely helpful as we build a product that helps organizations manage information in a way that is streamlined and transparent.
User feedback for the win.
Our COVID bot has kept a steady match rate of 80%, which directly translates into deflected inquiries, saved time, and reduced stress for the already stretched employees who would otherwise manually respond to each inquiry.
And the other 20% of questions without an answer in the knowledge base weren’t asked in vain either. Every unmatched answer and every thumbs up or thumbs down response forwards that interaction to a review queue. This enabled our team to quickly adjust the existing answer or create a new response. As maps, graphs, and policies changed, our team continually updated the knowledge base with accurate information regarding topics like:
- The shelter-in-place or quarantine orders recommending different sizes of group gatherings.
- The ever-changing CDC mask recommendations.
- Travel alerts being routinely updated.
- Government stimulus developments, which are still unfolding and being amended! (Ask the bot how to get a small business PPP loan, for example)
As the COVID-19 epidemic evolves, we will continue to monitor trends and feedback along with our partners at HR.com to provide the most accurate information possible for users, so they can effectively guide their organizations’ change management.
In the end, the overwhelming priority for creating this COVID bot was to help organizations give users a feeling of calm during the craziness. Receiving accurate and instant answers can help us all on that front, especially during a pandemic. We think offering it with a bot is an entirely new and exciting take on AI-powered technology.