Episode Transcript

Introduction

Jam (00:00:01.135)

Welcome to the Conversologist podcast, where we talk about the art and science of conversation in the digital space. We know that technology can be a powerful enabler in the customer journey from marketing to customer service, but communication and emotional connection still need to be at the core. I'm your host, Jam Mayer, and I invite you to converse with us.

Jam (00:00:23.875)

Welcome to Episode 10 WOO HOO!. I'm excited about this one. A conversation with a black ops chatbot operative. It's not as covert as it might sound. Black Ops is a chatbot design and build company based in Detroit, USA. Created by Matthew and Hilary Black and the very techie Marisha Goans. They are a group of hackers, strategists, writers, creators, speakers and futurists exploring the possibilities of automated messaging. I'm actually nearding out, I have Hillary herself as my guest speaker. Hello Hello!

Hillary (00:01:03.265)

Hi.

Jam (00:01:04.125)

OK, Hillary. I'm really excited, but I do have to ask I know it's not really in the show guide and so on, but are you related to Matthew, by the way?

Hillary (00:01:14.485)

So we're married.

Jam (00:01:16.135)

OK there you go.

Hillary (00:01:18.805)

Yeah, so I know we kind of joke that every person that starts has to change their last name to black since now we're sort of the majority have that last name already.

The Path to Conversation Design

Jam (00:01:29.585)

OK, so Hillary, as much as I try to avoid the E word in industries that are still very much still in their formative years, but you're as much as an expert. So that's the E word on chatbots as any of them. So to start with, can you just give me a background about you and what led you to the work you do today?

Hillary (00:01:51.535)

Sure. Yeah. And it's interesting that you say to not have expert, because I feel as if that's coming up a lot more recently. Truthfully, chatbots have been around since the early nineties of like smarter child and things like that. And we've had sort of these chatbots or robots throughout our lives, but really chatbots in conversation design have become a lot more popular in the past, like two to three years. So expert means two years of experience, basically.

Hillary (00:02:24.295)

And that's kind of like as far as it's going for now. So previously to being a chatbot designer and being a strategist, I have a background in social media. I started off my career as a writer and a blogger. And when I was like 12 years old, I started my first blog and sort of from there I was really hooked. And I went to college, studied English, started my blog there. That was sort of just like a lifestyle blog.

Hillary (00:02:52.285)

And I got really into that space. And the way to promote myself at the time was like on my personal Facebook page and on Twitter in like 2010. And so I started doing that for the websites that I was writing for as an intern. I would also do their social media and that was sort of a trend for me for a few years. And then in 2010, late 2010, I believe, or 2011, I got a job at a social media agency, which was sort of like a brand new thing at the time.

Hillary (00:03:26.125)

And I was a community manager, which basically meant I would go through our Facebook page and report any comments that were it was like a pharmaceutical company. And so any time people were using the product off label, I would have to respond to them and let them know that they were doing that. So it was not a very exciting industry to be in, but it was really exciting to me to sort of have these relationships with different bloggers because we also did influence our marketing and just see how people could be promoting their work with social media, see how you could really take over a brand voice.

Hillary (00:04:03.175)

And that was sort of my first experience in that. And then from there, in 2012, I started working at the University of Michigan, which is like a big university here in the United States. And that was really my first entry point into creating a brand for like a well-known brand. And so interacting with people throughout all social media platforms, Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter, everything, creating all of the content, really thinking about how we're going to speak with our audience who were young college students or high school students.

Hillary (00:04:37.315)

Yeah. So that was really interesting and really fun because we got to try a lot of new things and we got to experiment with a lot of things. And after that I moved out to New York and I had been living in New York previously. So all of my work is sort of spread across either the Detroit area or New York City. And so I worked in advertising for a while also as a copywriter and so everything I was doing was sort of getting shorter and shorter copywriting, but always switching brands, and one of my favorite things was having that different brand voice and creating that personality for a different brand, whether that was a university or whether that was taking on Beats by Dre headphones, which was one of my clients that I worked for in advertising.

Hillary (00:05:24.655)

And then my last, like, real job before working for myself was that buying the social media app before it unfortunately met its demise in 2016.

Hillary (00:05:38.155)

So I was creating all the content. I was interacting with people and that was really, really fun obviously, because that's a lot of great content and it was a very engaged audience. After that, I had no job because I got laid off when they shut down the company. And so I decided to do something I had always wanted to do, which was work for myself. And so I went on my own as a social media consultant. And also around this time, Black Ops was still a company founded by Matthew and Horacio.

Hillary (00:06:14.275)

And I had always worked with them to sort of manage their social. And we decided to create a chatbot when Facebook first announced boss. And it was just like a fun UFC unofficial chatbot.

Hillary (00:06:29.185)

And we had no idea what we were doing and we sort of just put it out there into the world. And we were just experimenting a little bit with writing scripts and putting them out and seeing if people would use them, promoting them on Reddit, just doing fun things to try to get users and learn a little bit. I believe it was 2017 we got put on this list that was rock star agencies to watch list.

Jam (00:06:53.395)

Wow.

Hillary (00:06:54.585)

Yeah. And they join us is the chatbot agency, which to us and like me, is still like a consultant for them working for them.

Hillary (00:07:03.625)

It was very much new stuff at the time because we did all of these other things. They built apps, they built websites, they did digital things. And Cha bot was a very small part of the business, but it was sort of like, we'll take this. And so we started getting big brands contacting us, saying we want to chatbot, but we don't really know what we're doing can you help us figure this out? We said yes, as any agency does. We said yes and we said we will figure it out.

Hillary (00:07:34.255)

We started from there just working with customers to really go through what does the strategy look like, what does the conversation look like and learning as we go, of course, and seeing the way that things are evolving from acquiring these users on Facebook, going from having a social media manager like myself back in the day, to having an automated message reply to people, and how would they respond to that? Would they know what to expect? How can we teach them how to use it?

Hillary (00:08:03.745)

How can we really get people from not knowing what this is to feeling comfortable chatting with it? It really just grew and we really saw that through any demographic from millennials, which you would expect would be very open to the idea of using the chatbot. Even the older demographics we built one that was for open enrollment for health care in the US and that demographic was people for Medicare. And so it's over 60 years old and it was fine. They loved it and the results were great.

Hillary (00:08:38.275)

And so we really have seen that it doesn't necessarily matter what age you're going after, it's how you're speaking to them, how you're teaching them how to use it. Since that we have built a lot of chatbots. We have also released two products. So one is stealth, which is our development framework that we build all of our bots on, and that's open source. And so people can go to get job and get it and use it to build their own bots.

Hillary (00:09:05.515)

And then we also have a sales chatbot product, which is called NAV, and that is sort of a more one stop shop of you want a sales chatbot, you want to acquire users with a bot on Facebook or through text messaging, but you don't have the skills to sort of spend all of the time designing and building it, knowing what to do, knowing how to advertise it. And so this is our way to just do all of the hard stuff for you.

Hillary (00:09:33.355)

And so we work with you to do all of that and then we build it. We help you through success and we help you advertise and all of that. So it's a lot easier than sort of coming in and us trying to teach someone every single thing that we have learned over the past four years, do all of that and then they can learn and then they can just have the product.

Jam (00:09:55.135)

Now, that's awesome. I was just going to say, it's interesting that you could be a little bit of a soul sister, because I started my journey as a blogger as well, so that's nice to hear.

Hillary (00:10:04.955)

Yeah

Jam (00:10:05.605)

That's pretty good. And then same kind of journey as well as social media and now into chatbots. Well, there you go. We have to have more episodes, Hillary. A lot to talk about. It's interesting.

Jam (00:10:18.405)

I've taken down notes while you were talking. We'll get back to that later on. I'm particularly interested about the Medicare chatbot that you were saying, because we're working on a client with that same demographic.

A Day in the Lift of a Conversation Designer

Jam (00:10:30.635)

But anyway, before we jump the gun here, because I have a lot of questions, so can we, I guess, just go to the basics for those who don't know what a conversation designer is? Or maybe you could tell us sort of what is your day like as a black ops conversation designer? I mean, what do you do on a daily basis?

Hillary (00:10:52.345)

So a lot of things. As being a small company and we have a team now, I think were seven people there's a lot of different things that need to be done.

Hillary (00:11:02.575)

And in addition to being the only conversation designer that we currently have, I also do a lot of the strategy with our customers. I do all the marketing for black ops for all of our products. But conversation design is my favorite. And I think to it's interesting that you say that people might not know what a conversation designer is. And that is something that like the chatbot expert conversation, it didn't exist as of like two years ago. And that's actually how a lot of people have found me as they Googled conversation design and they found a blog post that I wrote.

Hillary (00:11:46.975)

And so it's something that is very new. And it actually really reminds me of when social media jobs first became a thing. They didn't exist before and then overnight, here they are. And now there's a lot of them. So conversation design is one of those things. If I had to break down sort of what that part of my day looks like, it would be anything from talking with a customer and hearing all of the things that they may want their chatbot to do or answer questions about what they want the personality of their bot to sound like.

Hillary (00:12:19.015)

And then I sort of gather all of that information and take it and just digest it into what I understand as a two way conversation with their customer. So I sort of have to absorb like all of their brand and then take everything from chatbot design and just create a script, whether that is first created in an outline creating a prototype like a video prototype that I could send to them to say, hey, are we on the same page here? And then I will sit down and actually write the script from beginning to end.

Hillary (00:12:51.415)

So I sort of approach it in two way. Like, I try to always think of myself as a customer when I'm writing. And so I will be writing everything from the Chabot's perspective. And then I also write what the customer would reply, whether that is a quick reply or open ended reply. And so I make sure that everything sounds clear and I write through every single situation that could be. And so that's why having an outline is something that's very important and having that sort of understanding of what's our ideal journey for this user, because then it will sort of spin off into, OK, this is for a person that's qualified.

Hillary (00:13:33.565)

What if a person is not qualified? What if someone typed something the bot doesn't understand? And so writing all of that, then you have to sort of connect it through how could they get to all of these certain points? So that's the actual act of writing it. And then it would go through from there to the feedback part of it with both us internally and externally with the customers and then building it. So that's something that I am not involved in.

Hillary (00:14:04.375)

I know nothing about coding. I wish that I did, but yeah. And then from there it could be anything from testing the bots that have been built or talking to the customer and telling them how to use certain things, checking in on ones that are alive and seeing how people are interacting with them. You know, I'm writing it as an expert and someone who thinks that this is how a customer is going to use it. But once it's out in the wild, you have no idea really how people are going to use it, how they're going to understand it.

Hillary (00:14:36.925)

And so it's very important to sort of always keep an eye on that and use that to inform both changing things that you have done that you might have thought were clear, that were not clear, and then also for future projects to make sure that, you know, what are the best practices. I spent a lot of time sort of looking at all the things that we've done, trying to create a consistent way that. I am designing this and then always learning and always incorporating these new learnings into all scripts, so everything is sort of like a living and breathing thing at all times because we do like to test things and iterate on them regularly.

Jam (00:15:15.505)

If you were to put it in like a pie chart in your day or maybe in a week, probably it's just too granular. Right. The monitoring and the creating and the strategizing. Do you think you spend at least 20 percent of your time in a week to do monitoring, or is it a 50 50 versus the creation side of things?

Hillary (00:15:38.455)

They're sort of related. And so I would say that it's like if everything is going well in your monitoring, say twenty five percent of the time checking in and you're saying, how are these doing?

Hillary (00:15:49.705)

Or you're reading articles or you're just sort of like learning and honing in on your form of best practice. You may or may not need to change anything in the script. And so if you don't need to change anything, it's a lot less time with the design part of it. And I think the design is something that is more time consuming and more challenging in the beginning because you're creating something from nothing. And then once you get into this sort of iteration phase, it doesn't take as much time because you're changing one thing here.

Hillary (00:16:22.045)

You're adding a flow and that takes a few days or a few hours. And so I think it just depends on how everything is performing, how it ends up being split. And for me, having other roles within the company, conversation design and the monitoring is probably about a third of everything that I do. And then the other would be interacting with the customers for whatever they might need. In addition to doing our own business things, doing our own strategy, or having a strategy session with the clients, doing content marketing, endless amounts of things that, of course, always need to be done from a business perspective.

Hillary (00:17:00.895)

But I would say that it typically would end up being split between doing these changes and writing

Jam (00:17:08.395)

Cool! That's a lot of work. So for those who are listening to this episode, if you are planning or thinking of becoming a conversation designer, well, here you go. At least you've got a little bit of a sneak peek of what it's like.

Making a Chatbot more "human"

Jam (00:17:22.945)

OK, let's move on to a little bit of a topic that we love here at Conversologie. When we talk to clients as well, or when I do my presentations and unis or conferences or whatever. We talk a lot about chatbot personality. So what's your view on a chatbots personality and what's your process when you start strategizing and creating developing? Because you did say that earlier.

Hillary (00:17:48.595)

So and I know I've mentioned it a few times about sort of the personality and the brand voice and for me, creating bot for other people, a lot of the personality is determined based on them and it's determined based off of their brand. Well, and I guess like to back up a little bit before that. Yes.

Hillary (00:18:09.505)

I do think that you need to have a personality for chatbots. Whether that personality is a person or whether that personality is just a brand, especially coming from a background in marketing and in brand development. You have a brand whether or not you know it and whether or not you sort of sit down and have a strategy around that. Everything has an assigned personality of its own. It might be that that personality is no personality, however, is something that that if you don't have it, you know, your customer sort of assigns it to you.

Hillary (00:18:48.295)

And the way that you're writing or whoever you're writing for is assigning a personality to it. If you're doing it in a consistent way, which you probably are, the two different parts of it would be developing something based off of an existing brand. And so that would be how their brand talks to their customers currently, whether thats to their website, whether that's through their social media or them answering questions that I ask them. We have like an entire section of our customer, like onboarding process that's around personality.

Hillary (00:19:22.195)

That's sort of like if you were going to ask your customer this, how would you ask the question? And then we would sort of present different options with different layers of personality. And so going anywhere from like very professional to like a business casual to a very casual conversation and seeing what resonates with them and sort of using that to inform the personality of their chatbot. And so that's something that is in my sort of information phase of collecting all of their brand and then creating that into something that I think.

Hillary (00:19:59.455)

Translates to the interaction that we're going to be having with our customers and then the other part of it is creating a brand new thing. And so that might be we're creating a bot for ourselves to use to grow our own business or I'm creating something that is for fun or I'm creating something that is a new brand that has not launched yet. So they wouldn't necessarily have a perspective on all of these. That's by far my favorite.

Hillary (00:20:30.295)

Because then I get free rein to sort of create whatever I want. But what I do always make sure that I do is document it. And so I try to write things from like a human perspective of saying if this bot was a person, who are they? What are their characteristics? What are they like? What do they not like? Like where do they work? What age are they? What influencers do they respect? And so I sort of profile them and their audience as a person and then try to approach it from that perspective.

Jam (00:21:05.785)

So you're basically marketers, obviously, those who are listening to this one, you're creating a persona, chatbot persona, so to speak. Is that right?

Hillary (00:21:15.265)

Yes.

Jam (00:21:15.835)

Gotcha. OK, which is sort of like a follow up question because this has been debated, I don't know, at least within my network. But I don't know if you see the same back there in the US in terms of creating chatbot personas or the personalities. Another aspect to consider is creating personas, but based on the audience, based on the customer's persona. I mean, what are your thoughts on that?

Hillary (00:21:42.355)

So by that, do you mean having it sound like a human?

Jam (00:21:47.005)

Yes. And we'll get to that. But more of like instead of creating a personality, obviously, with a brand, I totally agree. But there's this other school of thought wherein, well, aren't you supposed to create scripts, for example, or a personality that is based on your audience or your customers. So you've got data on your customers, how they are, what they're like and that's why I'm segueing eventually to the Medicare chatbot that you created for the older demographic.

Jam (00:22:18.955)

Right. So that will be an interesting conversation as well as to whether you decided to create the personality based on the brand, or is it really based on the demographic or the audience? I hope I'm making sense.

Hillary (00:22:33.995)

So, yeah, I think it's more so it's important that you are creating it in a way that you're not like in a box. And so you want to always be and this is like for copywriting content or anything, you want to be positioning yourself as an authority. However, it's very important that you are saying things that a person with no knowledge of your subject would understand.

Jam (00:23:00.615)

Gotcha.

Hillary (00:23:01.105)

So whether that is taking your customer into account when you are writing the script and approaching it from their understanding of it, I think it's important to include that.

Hillary (00:23:13.555)

I think that it's important to obviously make sure that if they don't have an understanding of, say, life insurance and this is one of our customers, how long your term for life insurance should be? Most people wouldn't know the answer to that question. I wouldn't know the answer to that question. And so I think using that information from the customer of knowing this is where people usually get confused and overexplaining during that phase versus if the brand was talking to itself, it wouldn't have done that.

Jam (00:23:45.325)

No, makes sense. Since you mentioned earlier about making a chatbot more human. When I talk to even the students themselves and the university you know, they say this is sort of like an FAQ for me. So they ask, so should we actually tell the user at the start that, OK, I'm a chatbot, but I will be machine like versus making it more human so they're more engaging, etc., because some of the students would say, well, actually I don't really care. It's a bot I already know, it's a chatbot, it's a machine.

Jam (00:24:20.515)

So why, I don't expect the chatbot to be human. But of course as conversation designers, we create personalities and stuff to make it more engaging. What are your thoughts on making it more human or should we or shouldn't we?

Hillary (00:24:35.215)

Well, I definitely think that it is important to distinguish that it is not a human. And so that's sort of like the first thing. It's always disclosing that, like, this isn't a person instead of trying to, like, trick the audience into thinking that it's a person, like, I don't think that that is the correct approach.

Hillary (00:24:55.075)

However, some designers want to say this is a bot and this is it's name and sort of assign a human name to the bot, which is one approach and then another approach is to say that it's a chatbot, which is typically what we go with. And the reason why is because we actually think that it both sets an expectation to the user that this is an automated experience. And so we hope that they'll be a little bit more forgiving if something doesn't work and that it has limitations.

Hillary (00:25:27.545)

And so by saying, you know, I'm a chatbot, I can help you with this, this and this, that's what the user's going to expect that they will be helped with. And so it's more about the expectations that you're putting onto the user versus if you're just saying, hey, I'm a robot, and then they're like, oh, well, that must mean that you can do anything.

Jam (00:25:46.445)

Yeah,

Hillary (00:25:46.865)

it's important to establish that small layer of trust there and to really make sure that you are communicating that it is automated. And it's interesting that you say that they say, I know it's about I don't care because we actually think that people prefer to interact with chatbots than interact with humans, especially when they're going about things like learning about a life insurance policy or talking about their credit or talking about their debt or talking about things that they might be a little bit embarrassed about.

Hillary (00:26:19.745)

They don't want to talk to a human. And when they talk to a chatbot they have nothing to lose, they don't have it's not going to judge them. It's not going to say and it's not going to share anything with other people that they might know or someone at work. And if it works and if the experience is designed correctly and if the experience is engaging and maybe a little bit fun and it's informational and they can easily go from point A to point B of finding out whatever the bot says is going to help them.

Hillary (00:26:51.425)

They're going to prefer that to talking to a human. When someone cold calls you and they're asking you how your day is going, you don't really care. And, you know they don't really care.

Jam (00:27:01.865)

Yeah, no, that's an awesome insight because that is something that working with a few financial services companies here as well, not with chatbots, but let's say social media, for example, and most, if not all, because there's a lot of legal and compliances and everything and oh you know, they're not going to share stuff on messaging. Are you kidding me? You know, it's hard enough. So that's that's interesting. You have a very, very good point there.

Jam (00:27:28.325)

We're in well, it depends on how the script is done, obviously. I mean, if it is something that they would feel a little bit comfortable with. Yes. The fact that it isn't a human. So they don't feel embarrassed, but the way it's scripted and the personality than their guards go down or their walls go down, if that makes any sense, so they can freely and willingly give the appropriate information that you need.

Hillary (00:27:53.055)

Yeah. And if you think specifically about someone like celebrating their credit, we know that when people say their credit, they're probably inflating it a little bit. But even adding something and saying, like, it's totally cool, we're all friends here. They are going to be more likely to answer correctly. And it's similar to like when someone goes to a doctor's office and the doctor's asking them questions, how often do you exercise? You know, people are more likely to say, oh, five times a week when in reality it might be five times period.

Jam (00:28:23.585)

Yeah, OK.

Tools of a Conversation Designer

Jam (00:28:24.565)

You know, that's good. All right. Let's go back to being a conversation designer. That's awesome stuff on the personality side and being human. For those who are starting to learn how to become one. Do you have any recommendations in terms of basic tools of the trade, so to speak, or software that you use or you'd recommend for them to start using or learning?

Hillary (00:28:49.355)

This is probably my most asked question from like my Facebook group and people emailing me and everything that you should just do it. Like you need to just try and sort of learn by doing and by doing that, you're getting your own perspective and you're starting to create your own version of what your best practices are and trying different things. And so I always say, like instead of spending so much time just sort of getting knowledge and taking a course or doing something like that, you also want to be doing it and you want to make sure that you are staying current in to what the best practices are in the industry.

Hillary (00:29:25.955)

And so I think research a lot has just come up in my own experience of when I learned I wasn't a conversation designer before, I didn't have experience designing chatbots. And the way that I did it was I sort of went to Google, read a bunch of articles, started to figure out if I were to design a script, how would I do that? Created my own template that I use today for my scripts and read books and saw what was going on in the industry, used a lot of chatbots.

Hillary (00:29:58.415)

And so. Sort of like the starting ground, I always say, is to just consume all the information and start doing things, there's free tools out there that you can build chatbots in a couple of hours to sort of go from like the very beginning. There are like several books specifically about conversation design. But there's also I always recommend studying a bit of UX design and UX copywriting, because there are a lot of similarities between these two industries and there is a lot of fundamentals of UX writing that can very much apply to conversation design.

Hillary (00:30:39.025)

And that's something that it is a much more established industry that I think has a lot of online courses and has a lot of different tools that people can use. And in terms of like actual conversation design tools, my most used are for doing sort of like a flowchart I use Draw.IO, and that is something that you can drag and drop different shapes and just sort of try to create a flow map of what your conversation is going to be. And for the writing part of it, I have a Google Sheets template that I use that I have created, that I just mentioned, and I made that available to anyone that wants to use it.

Hillary (00:31:21.865)

So there's a few places that you can find that then I would use a prototyping tool. So there's a couple of different prototyping tools. And basically what that is, is that you might have an idea of something that you want to make into a chatbot, but you don't want to go through Foley and design the entire script and put it into production and spend all of that time because you don't even know how this would look. And so creating a prototype is something that is a great idea.

Hillary (00:31:48.685)

If you just want to see what would this look like in an actual, like Facebook chat. And so BotMock is one. And then Bot Society is another one. And they have many different platforms from Facebook to SMS to WhatsApp to voice now. And so any type of chatbot that you want to design, you could use those. And then in terms of actually making a living, breathing chatbot right now to make a Facebook chatbot, you can use either chat, fuel or many chat.

Hillary (00:32:20.245)

And those are both of the sort of no coding needed platforms, which is something that, of course, they have their own limitations in terms of they can't have super advanced conversations. They can use APIs. It wouldn't be something that you would want to use for a customer, for a brand. But you can get very, very far for personal, and especially if you're just starting out and you want to have examples for a portfolio you can definitely use,Chat or Many Chat to create a bot very quickly.

Jam (00:32:51.805)

Awesome. I've put that on your show notes for everyone to look at. Just to recap, Draw.IO and we will mention and how they can get the Google sheets available, because you've been very generous, obviously, to the community on Facebook with those tools that you've been using, prototyping to BotMock, Bot Society.

Skills Required for a Conversation Designer

Jam (00:33:11.095)

And of course, you've got your many chats and a chat fuels. It's interesting that you've mentioned about some skills, which segues to my next question, which is, as we know, it's a new role. You've already mentioned that earlier. I mean, that you've mentioned UX design and UX writing are some of the skills that conversation designers should have or could have. Are these some of the skills that companies are expecting now if they want to hire conversation designer? And if you could list a few more? Of course.

Hillary (00:33:40.045)

It's definitely those are skills someone could have because those are skills that I have. And as you heard me explaining my background, I didn't mention UX at all. And so everything is possible. It's possible to learn a new job and it is possible to especially position yourself in this very new field. If it's something that's interesting to you, start doing it, start trying, creating those skills for yourself, and then you can become it. It could be many different backgrounds that you're coming from.

Hillary (00:34:12.085)

I see a lot of people come from social media backgrounds because we have experience with short form copywriting. And I think copywriting definitely is like number one, the skill that you would want to have. But that could be multiple forms of copywriting. It could be social media copywriting, it could be UX, it could be website copywriting, it could be scriptwriting, like as a screenplay writer, just having different senses of how to write in a way that you're taking someone else's perspective as opposed to writing just for yourself.

Hillary (00:34:46.675)

But any form of writing is going to help you. The principles and the fundamentals of UX to me translate very well. However, that's not the background I came from. And so obviously there are other ways to do. I actually recently did my first job post for a conversation designer, it was sort of split between multiple roles, which I think we are seeing a bit more of.

Hillary (00:35:10.615)

And so it was like conversation design and project management. And so things that I'm seeing is people do want a little bit of experience when you're talking about, like the larger companies that are hiring for this in the US. But I think a lot of it is just understanding chatbots understanding all of the parts of it. I don't necessarily think that it is actually necessary to know how to build them. But if that's a skill and that's sort of a knowledge that you are able to have, because I think it takes like a very specific type of person to be able to learn how to build that.

Hillary (00:35:46.885)

And I don't have that. My brain doesn't seem to work in that way that I could actually learn how to build them. And so I am fortunate that I have people that they do. But if that's something that is interesting to you, I think it's definitely a skill that is a pro for people. And I think understanding marketing and I think understanding, you know, all parts of what goes into products and launching a product would be helpful problem solving.

Hillary (00:36:17.785)

I mean, that's like a very basic something that is very important. A lot of it is like working with a team, maybe with a technology team and being able to explain to them and be like the stakeholder in how this experience would work. A lot of people like use the word intent when they are explaining these sorts of jobs and saying, like, you'll be managing the intent or you'll be understanding the utterances. And so there's a lot of terms that people are using in these job postings that mean you understand the conversation and you know how to have one.

Hillary (00:36:51.145)

In terms of like qualifications. I know that there's a lot of sort of like courses that you can take. And of course, that is beneficial. But I don't think it's entirely necessary. I think that you can learn a lot from things like that, but you don't need to exclusively say I'm certified in XYZ. As a person that is hiring, I would much rather see "here are bots that I have created:" or "here are examples of copy that I have written and here are ways that I'm showing you that I understand a non-linear conversation or I understand a conversation that can go into multiple ways".

Hillary (00:37:30.655)

So there's different ways that you could present that to someone versus a certification. If you're certified in something you understand one way that one person told you how to do it. Certainly, if you are coming from square one and you don't know any of the background, it's important to do your research and it's important to learn things. And so if that's a way for you to learn, that's great. But I don't think that is a requirement.

Jam (00:37:55.735)

Awesome and that actually answers my other question, which is how to learn the craft. Because you did mention earlier, it's when you're starting there's a lot of research and it's a lot of learning and doing and I totally 100% agree. Sort of an additional thought to what you mentioned about certifications. I mean, it's still new. I mean, I don't know if anybody or any organization could present a certification maybe in their own brand, probably having certified from an organization.

Jam (00:38:28.285)

I kind of question it as well. But that's just me. I'm the same as you. You know, we figured it out. And by doing we actually learned the craft and we're still learning the craft as we go. That's why your community on Facebook is perfect, because we're learning from not just conversation designers themselves, but also the writers and and even the engineers and stuff in understanding the tech side of things, even though we don't really develop them.

Biggest Challenges a Conversation Designer Faces

Jam (00:38:55.825)

So I guess to just have a few more questions, one or two, before we end the episode, what is the biggest big question now? The biggest challenge every day or weekly or whatever it is? Is it technology, understanding human psychology? Or maybe it's something else I keep on going back to that older demographic, your Medicare chatbot. What was the biggest challenge there?

Hillary (00:39:19.315)

So I think a really big challenge from all parts of anything involving chatbots is the education part of it.

Hillary (00:39:26.935)

So there can be educating during sales. You're trying to sell it to the customer and they don't understand the chatbot because they haven't seen one or used one. Or you are trying to design a script for a customer and you know that they have never used one before. And so that's sort of like education of the value. What value are you unlocking by using a chatbot? What value is this person getting and knowing that they're going to get that they see an ad and they say see if you qualify for Medicare via chatbot, and they click on that and they know that they're going to be having a conversation with the chatbot on the other end.

Hillary (00:40:08.045)

And so I think it's like always keeping that in mind that we need to be educating is a great way to be able to face that challenge with new audiences. Of course, it's a challenge to both be using a chatbot to acquire users that requires a certain type of skill because you need to get someone to understand and click on your ad.

Hillary (00:40:30.635)

And then you also need to educate the person on how to interact with the chatbot. I love a challenge like this because we can consider, especially with Facebook, it's very easy to use the different things that Facebook has available to you in terms of media. So you can say, you know, using the buttons below, like you're educating them on how to reply. And you could even include a video or a photo. If you're asking them to do something like upload a receipt photo, you could show a video of exactly how you do that and you can show an example of what you're looking for so that the person understands what they're expected to do.

Hillary (00:41:13.265)

So we make sure that all throughout the conversation we are setting these expectations. And then additionally, we want to make sure that we are providing value to the customer so that by doing this experience, they're getting something. That's the most important thing is that we are able to provide value that they could not get elsewhere. We're not just copying the entire website and putting it into a chatbot we're making sure that they are going to gain something by going through it. Then the education to come back to the technology part of it, of being able to educate customers and potential customers that Chabot's aren't just technology.

Hillary (00:41:54.005)

It's like technology plus conversation. Technology, plus strategy. It's not just like a technology problem that you can say, oh, we'll just make this as smart as possible and it will understand everything and it will be able to have conversations. And we don't need a designer because they can just talk on its own. That's not true. It's not realistic.

Jam (00:42:14.765)

Wow. Yeah, yeah. No, I love it. And that triggered sort of an idea. Is it also and correct me if I'm wrong as a designer, you just mentioned it earlier. It's sort of like a mind map of sorts. Right. And anticipating and what is going to happen and what the person is going to ask and so on. So if you think about it, it's this complex diagram in front of you and then making it simple when the user is now interacting with it, which unlocks the value and education, I hope I kind of summarised that correctly.

Hillary (00:42:48.635)

Definitely. And it's the education unlocking and it's also how they're going to get to certain things. If someone is saying, I want to learn more about you, what do they want to learn? And showing them how they can respond appropriately.

Jam (00:43:06.215)

I always go back and I'm so interested in that older demographic because we've always hit a wall when we say, well, a chatbot could be a solution right? Well hang on, that's not going to work. Those are just for the the younger ones. Are markets like the 60 year olds and 50 year old so it's not going to work. But you've just proven that you have a solution and you've deployed a chatbot that is engaging and it actually had good results with an older demographic. I guess my question around that is, what did you do that made it work?

Hillary (00:43:41.345)

Well, if you think about who is on Facebook and who is active and uses it all the time, that who uses it. I think that, like, we have this idea that older demographics don't understand technology when in fact, those are the people who spend the time and have someone teach them and do all of these things to get better at it so they can interact with their family members and whoever else.

Hillary (00:44:08.285)

And so I think that we owe it to them to give them a bit more credit than they can use Facebook. And it's us and US is one of my favorite chat platforms right now. I think that, like the potential there is very great. However, I do know that older demographics might not have smartphones and they might not know how to text or they might be slower to text. And so it's just thinking about for both of those platforms, what can you do to sort of remove all points of friction from this person and make it super easy and make it very quick?

Hillary (00:44:46.745)

And so it might be removing some of those extra messages that are just for fun, for personality, making it a lot more straightforward. It might be only asking yes or no questions. It might be removing their ability to type in Facebook, like you can turn that off so they can only click buttons and they can't type anything. And it's also very, very important at that stage to make sure that you have a plan if they respond with something that the chatbot doesn't understand and that they are able to get back on track very easily.

Hillary (00:45:19.115)

I'm just saying we don't understand. This is the way that we want you to respond. This is a one click button so that you can get back on track. And I think that that really is something that you can see how they would figure it out .

Jam (00:45:34.835)

Thank you so much. That's awesome. Well, look, we can definitely talk all day, right? We can definitely talk another time. That's the truth. I want you back, by the way, on another episode we could talk about that later. That just about wraps up this episode. And thank you so, so much, Hilary, for gracing our podcast with your presence.

Hillary (00:45:59.825)

Thank you for inviting me.

Jam (00:46:01.325)

Love to have you here. Really, your experience and knowledge definitely is very, very beneficial to our listeners. If there's one thing that you'd want them to take away, because I know this is quite a long episode. Is there one thing that you'd like our listeners to actually remember?

Hillary (00:46:16.625)

I guess the one thing that I want anyone to know if any person is interested in conversation design is to just try it. And we want you to be a part of our community. This sort of role is so unique and so important. And I think that this part of this industry is as important as the technology part of it. And I think that we should think it's even more important in the technology part of it.

Jam (00:46:42.665)

Yeah, I totally agree.

Closing

Jam (00:46:45.635)

For those who are listening, do visit black ops at whoisblackops.com. You will see the link. You can click on it very easily in our show notes and of course on our website and check out the team and their work. Join us. Hilary and I are on that Facebook group or community that we were talking about during this episode. It's called chatbot Conversation Designers, Internet Club. Again, you'll find the link on the same website and show notes, but doesn't end there. We'd love to continue the conversation. If you're on Anchor FM, leave a voice message and we could pick that up and put in our next episode.

Jam (00:47:26.205)

If you found us on Social or your usual podcast app, drop comment or you can visit our page, TheConversologist.show and tell us what you think.

Jam (00:47:37.325)

Music Bed was, by the way, composed by Carlo Vergara and this podcast and images were produced by my co-host, Rew Shearer. Till the next episode. Thanks for listening and talk soon. Thank you again, Hilary.

Hillary (00:47:50.795)

Thank you.