11 Chatbot Examples

& the Lessons Learned

Explore the possibilities for a chatbot from 11 real chatbot examples. Mobile Coach customers shared their chatbot designs, how they built their bots, and the lessons they learned along the way during Mobile Coach’s 2023 User Conference. These use cases vary widely and show the innovation and possibilities of a chatbot!

CHATBOT STORIES

Using Chatbots To Prepare for Future Work

Joy Rechanek and Scott Morgan from Dell Computers shared how they built an innovative on-demand program that supports behavior-driven learning.

Chatbot Design:

  • 13 week conversation that takes about 10 minutes a week max
  • Personalized schedule and topic
  • Features: Button reply, emojis, gifs
  • Proactively send researched based tips to level up your skill. Microlearning course disguised as a guided conversation. 

Purpose

  • Prepare for the future of work for a large workforce
  • How to provide 1:1 support for team members to develop human skills

 

Lessons Learned & What’s Next:

  • How to promote and communicate it is vital. “You can have a great script, a great chatbot, but no one knows about it”
  • Looking to build a “Botrary” or a library of chatbots.
  • Development took about 2 months (internal team built the bot). Anticipating future chatbots would be faster. The longest part of development was learning the platform

My next Coach is a Chatbot - Ridiculous or Reasonable?

Emma Weber from Lever Transfer of Learning created Coach M, a coaching bot that creates behavior change via action plans.

Chatbot Design:

  • 3-12 month experience
  • Reflective coaching conversation
  • 20-30 minute learning break conversation with the Chatbot, Coach M
  • Used on SMS, MS Teams, Slack, and more

Problem:

  • Prevent wasted training due to lack of learning transfer
  • Hard to change behaviors

Results:

  • 65.5% average improvement on goal
  • 58.3% high goal progress with Coach M

Lessons learned:

  • Leverage data to identify progress with behavior change and analyze common barriers, actions, and wins from the cohort.

Introducing Blu – a chatbot for learning in the United Nations

Ugo Caruso, Sofia Exarchou, and Claudia Gallardo Sanchez launched Blu, a concierge for their LMS that answers common questions to reduce help requests and wait time.

Chatbot Design:

  • Pop-up chatbot on the UN’s LMS (Blue Line)
  • Answers common FAQ questions
  • Guides users through a self-assessment to personalize course recommendations
  • Schedules study time blocks in calendar

Problems:  Scalable support to enable self-directed journey

Goal: Improve user and learning experience

Lessons learned:

  • Balance design ideas against how much time it will take to build. Not all ideas are best suited for a chatbot or your goals.
  • Feedback survey was too frequent and too many questions. Balance data against a good user experience

Nacho Your Ordinary Bot: Educating the Workforce on Sustainability using Digital Technology

Valerie Quezada, Daniel Lachman, and Obed Varela from Takeda created a gamified experience  to drive sustainability to initiatives for World Environment Week 2022.

Chatbot Design:

  • 1-week experience to coincide with World Environment Week 2022
  • Pushed to employees using MS Teams 
  • 1 question a day to earn points for one of a kind Nacho Bot T-shirt (extreme limited edition)
  • Leaderboard
  • MS Teams

Goal: 

  • Increase sustainability awareness
  • Highlight World Environment Week.
  • Highlight recent sustainability initiatives at the site.

 

Lessons learned:

  • Start planning and implementation earlier 
  • Increase visual communication at site level
  • Investigate different incentives to increase participation experience

Starting the journey with Sophie - ASU Career Catalyst’s solution to guided learning

Erin Wilson from Arizona State University created a self-sustaining, friendly and easy-to-use chatbot to provide a sense of social presence in a fully self-paced and asynchronous course

Chatbot Design:

  • Introductory course guide for ASU courses
  • One-time experience
  • Offers suggestions about areas of focus and areas of strength for each learner
  • Conversational tone
  • Personalized results

Problem:

  • Learners don’t always know where to start or what they can skip over 
  • Learners are concerned about a lack of interaction in self-paced online courses

 

Lessons learned:

  • Already iterated 3 times since starting the process
  • Piloted with 4 professional skills courses
  • Looking towards knowledge base and feedback based updates
  • Tracking progress to keep learners on desired pathway
  • Using variables to replace repeated words
  • Take the time to learn the language

LEE – Learning Engagement Expert: Developing an institutional chatbot persona to support knowledge reinforcement

Roula Drossis and Jennifer Dolan from IC Axon established LEE and the chatbot modality as a viable and effective tool for supporting ongoing skill-building and knowledge reinforcement.

Chatbot Design:

  • Deployed via a combination of SMS and web widget – mobile only 
  • 15-week campaign, deployed every Tuesday morning 
  • Dialogue and social verbiage as the connective tissue between the learning and reinforcement material
  • Scenario-based and adaptive responses (right, almost right, wrong) to provide reinforcement and additional direction

Opportunity:

  • Client’s sales team shifted from face-to-face to selling to virtual selling and needed to practice hybrid selling skills
  • Recently introduced a new selling model
  • They recognized the need for reinforcement of these training initiatives and were challenged by the need to minimize time out-of-field 
  • They were looking for a high-impact solution that could be implemented quickly and frequently to maximize the return on the investment made in the initial trainings

Lessons learned:

  • Having key leadership as internal champions to endorse the chatbot 
  • Reducing the number of “clicks” to engagement (SMS to web widget is an extra step. Continuing in SMS or having the entire engagement in MS Teams might be easier) 
  • Value of participant survey to inform the design of the next campaign

iTrain Ali – the IT training chatbot

Vanessa Theaker and Dorigen Sykes from iTrain Legal designed iTrain Ali to improve buy-in and adoption of new systems and/or processes and overcome barriers to learning on return to desk.

Chatbot Design:

  • ‘Knowledge base’ style bot 
  • Table format (content is organized within csv) 
  • Development of Learning assets: 40 to 150 separate guides/videos in each module 
  • Proactive communications & follow ups
  • MS Teams and web widget

Goals:

  • Deliver training support at point of need 
  • Help with ‘How do I…?’ questions 
  • Promote best practice working methods 
  • Make training content easy to access 
  • Communicate change to the firm 
  • Ability to cover a range of software applications 
  • Support the hybrid workplace

 

Lessons learned:

  • Continuous cycle – keeping it fresh 
  • Consider adding more channels
  • Incorporate ‘Knowledge Base’ functionality 
  • Further develop proactive and follow up scripts 
  • Don’t underestimate the time involved to produce quality content 
  • Dedicated resource 
  • Attention to detail 
  • Check and check again

Leveraging Mobile Chatbots for Coaching and Virtual Connection

Melissa M Carroll from Kaiser Permanente built a suite of chatbots to augment existing learning events and performance support with engaging, accessible technology that retains learning

Initial Chatbot Design:

  • 26 pilot participants 
  • 12 weeks of messages (2-3 message series sent per week) 
  • Mix of interactive texts, videos, graphics, guides, and reminders
  • SMS
  • Coach Grover avatar
  • Have since launched several other chatbots

Lessons learned:

  • Improved learner engagement supports reinforcement 
  • Chatbots are a frictionless way to engage users wherever they may be 
  • Think creatively 
  • Even though the technology is now accessible, you need careful design sensibility and solid project planning

Further developing emotional intelligence skills with the help of a chatbot

Dany Spenser shared how at IHHP they developed a chatbot to support behavior change for an EI training.

Chatbot Design:

  • 8 week conversation
  • Tuesdays & Thursdays
  • SMS, MS teams, FB messenger
  • Schedules study time blocks in calendar

Goals:

  • Practice EI skills
  • Recall what they learned
  • Review content with new activities

 

Lessons learned:

  • Focus on what would engage your learners the most
  • Start small
  • Don’t make the experience too long
  • It doesn’t have to be “all or nothing”
  • Ask for feedback throughout 
  • Have your internal team go through the experience
  • Iterate often

Choose Your Own Learning Adventure Pathways

Treion Muller the Modern Learning Architect created a chatbot to give readers experiences and example of what the book represents outside of reading.

Chatbot Design:

  • Menu based chatbot
  • QR codes in book that point to different resources
  • Optional to schedule content overtime as part of certain menu options
  • SMS

Goal: Show readers effective learning principles

Lessons learned:

  • Reading/learning doesn’t need to be a linear experience
  • Chatbots are awesome!
  • Learner journey can continue after the reading is complete

ULActiveBot: A chatbot to make everyone more active!

Shreyas Korad, Shivaji Babar, and Alesiya Khan from Upside Learning 

Chatbot Design:

  • 6 month “phygital” experiment
  • Supported online meetings, physical outings, and hosted monthly events
  • Reminders
  • Activity log
  • Buttons
  • MS teams

Goals: 

  • Improve the mental health of employees by encouraging physical activity
  • Engage employees with each other to increase conversation and connection

 

Lessons learned:

  • Employee engagement is harder than we think
  • Testing features for ease of use with more rigor to get better engagement numbers
  • reading is complete