{"id":12693,"date":"2017-05-24T17:45:15","date_gmt":"2017-05-24T16:45:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.intercom.com\/?p=12693"},"modified":"2020-07-30T12:57:57","modified_gmt":"2020-07-30T11:57:57","slug":"designing-half-of-a-conversation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.intercom.com\/blog\/designing-half-of-a-conversation\/","title":{"rendered":"Designing half of a conversation"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"opening_paragraph\"><a href=\"ttps:\/\/s47858.p1078.sites.pressdns.com\/blog\/principles-bot-design\/\">Bot design<\/a> is at a fork in the road. It keeps circling back to the same issues, like a chatbot that keeps saying \u201cI didn\u2019t quite get that\u201d to a user getting more frustrated by the minute.<\/p>\n<p>Ahead of us, there are two roads:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>A future based on artificial intelligence, building toward a real understanding of what a person is saying, then generating the right response. This is hard to do with a high degree of accuracy, and leads to all sorts of potentially creepy sci-fi futures.<\/li>\n<li>A future of controllable, scripted responses to a fixed set of commands. These bots may be full of personality and generate complex scripts, but their understanding is basic, and they can\u2019t guarantee a nuanced response.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Choosing the right road means <em>choosing the right way to understand the other side of the conversation<\/em>. To what degree should a bot anticipate what\u2019s happening on the other side of the wall?<\/p>\n<h2 id=\"whats-a-conversation\">What\u2019s a conversation?<\/h2>\n<p>Anticipating the other side of the conversation is not a new communication problem. Between humans, communication is incredibly faulty.<\/p>\n<p>Our participation in conversations means not just listening to words and parsing them, but subconsciously listening to dozens of other factors \u2014 how a person sounds, what they look like, their body language, where you both are. The semiotics of conversation are complex, even before you get to the content \u2014 and even then, the content has layers: the topic of conversation, the goal you\u2019re trying to get to, how you feel about all of it.<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s a wonder we ever manage to communicate at all.<\/p>\n<p>To parse through all of this, the designer Paul Pangaro came up with a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.pangaro.com\/designing-for-conversation.html\">model of conversations<\/a> called CLEAT:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Context<\/li>\n<li>(Shared) Language<\/li>\n<li>Engagement or exchange<\/li>\n<li>Agreement<\/li>\n<li>Transaction or action<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>He says that to reach an action, you must first reach agreement. To reach agreement, you must have engagement. And to even begin to engage, you must have shared language.<\/p>\n<p>If done right, Pangaro says, we reach lofty goals \u2014 shared history, forged relationships, trust, and unity. And all of this should be the goal of good software, he says, because \u201cSoftware with conversation at its heart is more human.\u201d<\/p>\n<h2 id=\"just-enough-communication\">Just enough communication<\/h2>\n<p class=\"quote quote-left\">Software with conversation at its heart is<br \/>\nmore human.<\/p>\n<p>Over the last year, we\u2019ve begun experimenting with bot design at Intercom \u2014 we\u2019ve written before about <a href=\"https:\/\/www.intercom.com\/blog\/how-to-name-a-bot\/\">some of the design considerations<\/a> we made along the way about its role, its name, its personality, and the jobs it was designed to do.<\/p>\n<p>Our bot intentionally handles only a few small jobs, the most essential of which is to keep customers and businesses (teams) in contact, even when the team is away.<\/p>\n<p>As a participant in a conversation, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.intercom.com\/blog\/principles-bot-design\/\">it\u2019s deliberately restrained<\/a>. Everything about its conversation style is intended, not to keep the conversation going, <em>but to spark only a limited reply<\/em>. Because we favor human to human conversation over automation for its own sake, our bot is allowed to have just enough communication to get the job done, but no more. That means we get rid of a lot of non-essentials: no hellos, no names or genders, no apologies.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-12699 alignright\" src=\"https:\/\/intercom.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/05\/Screen-Shot-2017-05-24-at-4.21.58-PM-300x130.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"130\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.intercom.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/05\/Screen-Shot-2017-05-24-at-4.21.58-PM-300x130.png 300w, https:\/\/www.intercom.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/05\/Screen-Shot-2017-05-24-at-4.21.58-PM.png 580w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/>Without all the usual niceties of human conversation, this could be the rudest bot in existence. Yet we\u2019ve found, as we\u2019ve beta tested the bot, that people don\u2019t see it that way. They understand that it\u2019s automated, find it helpful, and even thank it for getting them what they need.<\/p>\n<p>Most of all, they don\u2019t expect it to do the job they want a human to do. They don\u2019t demand or expect more conversation once the transaction is achieved.<\/p>\n<p>If we wanted to design the world\u2019s first introverted bot, we seem to have succeeded.<\/p>\n<h2 id=\"the-key-to-better-conversations\">The key to better conversations<\/h2>\n<p>Our bot philosophy mirrors Pangaro\u2019s conversation model. The key to that model is that every conversation has a goal. While customers usually have a question in mind \u2014 their goal \u2014 the way the bot tries to engage them is much more about understanding their <strong>context and motivation<\/strong> than it is about understanding the actual semantics of their conversation.<\/p>\n<p class=\"quote\">If we wanted the world\u2019s first introverted bot, we did it<\/p>\n<p>We spend most of our time <strong>understanding that context<\/strong>, and making sure we can deliver the right answer, in the right way, with the right tone.<\/p>\n<p>We also make sure the bot <strong>has a job to do<\/strong>, to exchange information or engage the user.<\/p>\n<p>And we make sure there\u2019s <strong>agreement<\/strong> about what the bot is, and what its role is.<\/p>\n<p>Finally, we reach a <strong>transaction<\/strong>.<\/p>\n<p>Our hope is that this model creates stronger relationships, built on trust, between the teams that use Intercom, the customers they speak to, and Intercom itself.<\/p>\n<h2 id=\"designing-nuances\">Designing nuances<\/h2>\n<p>In the real world, even when we understand someone\u2019s words perfectly, we still don\u2019t have a guarantee of successful communication. Real conversations have to tease out these nuances by looking for context and clues.<\/p>\n<p>And real conversations can get it wrong: we make assumptions about others\u2019 goals and motivations all the time. We\u2019re human. Making assumptions based on context is how we pattern-match, so that we can engage in conversations in the first place. This is exactly what we do as designers, and what machine learning algorithms do \u2014 we look for patterns, and match our responses to them.<\/p>\n<p>But in our pattern-matching, as in the real world, we hear things imperfectly. We get things wrong. In the real world, a little imperfection is fine. In the bot world, it\u2019s a risk.<\/p>\n<h2 id=\"allowing-for-imperfection\">Allowing for imperfection<\/h2>\n<p>The way we get around mistakes is by narrowing our constraints \u2014 being very specific about the goal or job of our conversation \u2014 and by enriching the context signals we\u2019re aware of as we design.<\/p>\n<p>Constraints are our way of dealing imperfectly with imperfection. We do just what we know will be helpful, and no more, and we err on the side of silence.<\/p>\n<p>Context is our way of building nuance into an interaction, and making the interaction with our bot feel simple, direct, and positive.<\/p>\n<p>That\u2019s why a bot has to lean back from the conversation in order to listen more closely: if we get something wrong, the trust that\u2019s lost is far greater than between two humans. And our bot is there to forge trust between a team and their customers. That\u2019s a big job, even when it\u2019s done quietly and with restraint.<\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<p class=\"inline-cta-quote\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.intercom.com\/blog\/operator-custom-bots\/?utm_medium=ii-blog&amp;utm_source=blog-cta&amp;utm_campaign=20180905-custom-bots-blog\">If you&#8217;re as excited as we are about how chatbots can grow your business, you can get started right here.<\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.intercom.com\/blog\/operator-custom-bots\/?utm_medium=ii-blog&amp;utm_source=blog-cta&amp;utm_campaign=20180905-custom-bots-blog\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"small\" src=\"https:\/\/intercom.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/09\/Custom-Bots-CTA.png\" alt=\"Download The Beginner's Guide to Real-Time Sales\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Bot design is at a fork in the road. It keeps circling back to the same issues, like a chatbot that keeps saying \u201cI didn\u2019t quite get that\u201d to a user getting more frustrated by the&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":169,"featured_media":12696,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"category":[5],"tags":[339,340,489,10721,494],"coauthors":[360],"class_list":["post-12693","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-product-and-design","tag-bots","tag-chat","tag-chatbots","tag-content-design","tag-conversational-commerce"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v27.3 (Yoast SEO v27.3) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-premium-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Designing half of a conversation - The Intercom Blog<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"As bots in customer service become more common, anticipating the other side of the conversation will be vital. 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