A Conversation-Driven Approach for Chatbot Management

Managing and evolving a chatbot’s content is a laborious process and there is still a lack of standardization. In this context of standardization, the absence of a management process can lead to bad user experiences with a chatbot. This work proposes the Chatbot Management Process, a methodology for content management on chatbot systems. The proposed methodology is based on the experiences acquired with the development of Evatalk, the chatbot for the Brazilian Virtual School of Government. The focus of this methodology is to evolve the chatbot content through the analysis of user interactions, allowing a cyclic and human-supervised process. We divided the proposed methodology into three distinct phases, namely, manage, build, and analyze. Moreover, the proposed methodology presents a clear definition of the roles of the chatbot team. We validate the proposed methodology along with the creation of the Evatalk chatbot, whose amount of interactions was of 22,771 for the 1,698,957 enrolled attendees in the Brazillian Virtual School of Government in 2020. The application of the methodology on Evatalk’s chatbot brought positive results: we reduced the chatbot’s human hand-off rate from 44.43% to 30.16%, the chatbot’s knowledge base examples increased by 160% whilst maintaining a high percentage of confidence in its responses and keeping the user satisfaction collected in conversations stable.