Designing Bots

Chapter 16. Conversation Scripting

Love without conversation is impossible.

—MORTIMER ADLER

IN THIS CHAPTER WE will script the conversations our B2B and B2C bots will have. We will break down the conversations into flows (sometimes called stories), and detail the entities we want to extract. We will start to map edge cases and error handling, and will decide when to use plain text and when to use rich controls.

At a high level, here is the flow we would like to facilitate with both bots (Figure 16-1).

Figure 16-1. A high-level view of the PTOBot/VacationBot flow

I have highlighted the PTOBot part in blue and the VacationBot part in peach. We will now outline the specific flows that compose the use case for each bot.

Outline of Flows

The first step we are going to take is exploring the different flows that compose our bots’ use cases.

Onboarding

As previously discussed, a thoughtful onboarding could be the difference between a successful bot engagement and an abandoned bot. In this section we will try to follow the best practices of demonstrating value and providing a call to action.

Key takeaway

Thoughtful onboarding could be the difference between a successful bot engagement and an abandoned bot.

PTOBot

The PTOBot onboarding is slightly complex. It starts with the person who installed the bot, and continues to the team the bot was added to (Figure 16-2). I will highlight 1:1 interactions ...