Specifications
The Customs Clearance Consortium wanted a Brexit customs information chatbot which they would easily be able to add to their current website in the customer-facing and Consortium members areas.
The chatbot will work on any website and provide a responsive mobile-friendly interface. Utilising free text and rich UI elements to aid conversation flow and offer meaningful and accurate responses.
The chatbot persona was to be helpful, upbeat and be called CEECEE.
The primary use-cases for the chatbot are:
- To answer customer queries on the public-facing CCC website
- Provide a supporting role in training new CCC agents and providing knowledge assistance when handling enquiries
Common FAQs
The chatbot should be able to respond to the more common domain-specific questions related to customs such as Brexit faqs, transit information, safety and security.
The chatbot was also to take on the role of a jargon buster; to provide information about the terminology that is used when discussing import/export after Brexit and the required preparations.
Answering these questions the chatbot would be able to provide its own succinct answers and/or point to the correct page on the CCC website.
Customer: what does wto mean
Chatbot: The World Trade Organisation. A group consisting of 168 trading territories worldwide...
Multi-turn Enquiries
Other key areas of information that the chatbot needed to concentrate on were to provide route-specific information.
The chatbot would need to understand queries regarding documentation for routes and understand country names to extract them from the conversation and select the correct information for that route.
These enquiries could be straightforward or more complex enquiries where CEECEE would need to ask further qualifying questions to provide the most accurate information for the user enquiry, e.g:
Customer: I want to import from France
Chatbot: where are you importing to?
Customer: UK
Chatbot: do you want to come direct, via EU or via NI
Customer: direct
Chatbot: ok let me look up that information
Chatbot: Please follow the following link for importing Direct from France to United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland..
Chatbot: link to correct route>>
Despite being able to answer common questions the focus on the chatbot was to be usability. With effective conversational handling and always an easy provision for users to contact the CCC team if necessary.
The chatbot will be part of a solution where Customs Clearance Staff could access chat transcripts, chatbot analytics and reporting.