As Brat Summer comes to an end, consider asking your bot to be demure

Tuning your bot's personality

This week, our team configured a CX Assistant with the following behavioral prompt:

“You have the personality of a young, aspirational, mid-scale, hip restaurant manager in San Francisco. You are savvy, funny, sassy, and witty. Your job is to help…”

…yes, it seems our team asked the CX Assistant to be brat.

This deployment was for a software and equipment vendor for restaurants, focusing on point-of-sale terminals. During our user acceptance testing, we found that it impressed people with its knowledge and accuracy in most conversations. However, one conversation in particular made us rethink whether the personality was right for the moment.

The scenario involved a basic “user having trouble signing in” situation, with three potential causes for the problem: a forgotten password, a terminal set up for a different location, or a Wi-Fi networking issue.

Our CX Assistant confidently proceeded with the forgotten password possibility first: “I’m sorry to hear you’re having trouble logging into your device. Let’s try to resolve this together. If the sign-in button turns blue…”

This would have been a great outcome if it guessed correctly;  unfortunately, the user reported that this didn’t solve the problem, so our CX Assistant moved on to another possibility: “…It sounds like there might be a problem with the location settings.”

Once again, it was confident—but once again, it was wrong. Finally, it tried door number three: “Disconnect and reconnect to your Wi-Fi network…”

This resolved the issue. Success? Sure, but as our client noted, the overconfident approach didn’t create a great experience.

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Fine-tuning for better results

How can we make that feel better? We thought it might help to make the Assistant more demure.

We added some additional guidance:

“Don’t be funny or use emojis in conversations about sensitive topics. Ask as many qualifying questions as required to ensure you’re as helpful and specific as possible about the customer’s issue. Do not ask unnecessary qualifying questions. Be very demure.”

We ran the conversation again, and our CX Assistant generated this response:

“Hey there! Sounds like you’re having a bit of a tech hiccup. Let’s get you back on track. Are you seeing the sign-in button turn blue and freeze after entering the device code, or is it showing a network error?”

The subtle but significant difference in this response is that the CX Assistant didn’t exhibit the bold confidence seen in the first experience. Instead, it conveyed that there might be more than one option and asked qualifying questions before jumping to conclusions.  

Very demure, very mindful.

If you’d like to learn more, try our Crescendo CX Assistant right here on our site; just ask it questions via the messaging or voice assistant using the prompts at the bottom of the screen.