Ok, not the Bob Seger song you were expecting?

The Product

It seems like chatbots are everywhere online now. Visit a website (e.g., se.com), and, if not immediately then after a short visit, a chatbot appears to welcome you to the site. The ever popular “Can I help you?” or some variation of the prototypical sales intro seems to be the de facto icebreaker.

How they work

Chatbots are programs designed to mimic human conversation. Today, most use some level of artificial intelligence (AI) via natural language processing (NLP) to determine what the site visitor needs and how best to respond. That response could come in the form of a text reply, a link to a resource within the website, or maybe even delivering a specific action (like renewing your car’s registration).

How to use this in education/training and why?

Instead of the chatbot being a sales servant, why not make it a visitor/customer trainer? And what if that visitor is an employee? Could the chatbot then be used to train the employees?

Soitenly!

The notion of an AI-supported Natural Language Processing (NLP) chatbot, or better still a virtual agent/trainer, used as the user interface (UI) for training, both employees and customers, is very appealing.

Customer support, especially post-COVID, is moving headlong into the digital self-service era. So why fight it? Why not support it? Since the chatbot has become accepted, if not expected when visiting company websites today, and since the chatbot is offering to help, shouldn’t the chatbot help the customer help themselves? This will make the customer feel better about your company and your products and services and can lead to better brand loyalty. And loyal, returning customers are what everyone in business wants (O’Connell, 2023).

Now, let’s not have a chatbot just to be cool. Let’s have a chatbot that actually works for us as well as for the customer and provides many levels of service, not just the obvious one the customer is asking for. By training the chatbot with the company personality and specific intellectual property (IP) (Sundararajan, 2022), the chatbot can become an easy extension of our workforce.

For the “lecture” or theory part of any training, the delivery of the content can take place in a number of ways. Including:

• The lecturer can be the “sage on the stage” and do the presentation from the podium using (hopefully) some form of multimedia support such as PowerPoint and video.
• Just have the learner read the document.
• Have the content presented via video recording (most likely of the lecturer’s session)
• Via an eLearning course

Or… by interacting with a chatbot. This concept of the chatbot has proven to be successful in corporate environments, including as part of a hybrid approach that also includes in-person praxis verification (Kowald & Bruns, 2022).

In some workflows, there is a constant connection to the internet. When this is available, the chatbot can be resident as an Artificial Intelligence as a Service (AIaaS) (Kanade, 2022). Examples include Einstein Copilot for Salesforce users or even Microsoft Copilot for Windows users in general.

If the company uses software with a chatbot element (like MS Teams or Einstein), the chatbot could be used to engage users, and via cookies set, could interact with them over the longer term. Cookies and a login could certainly help customize content for visitors and repeat customers. Employees would most definitely have a login and with that their profile could include their training transcripts. From these transcripts, the chatbot’s AI could push notifications to the user to engage in some periodic training and upskilling. By delivering the content in smaller, inline content along with revisits over time for spaced learning (Clark, 2020), the internalization and implementation of the training content should increase.

And isn’t that what we’re after? Increased retention of the content to make everyone more productive?

References

Clark, D. (2020). Artificial Intelligence for Learning. Kogan Page.

Kanade, V. (2022, February 10). What Is Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a Service? Definition, Architecture, and Trends. Retrieved from Spiceworks: https://www.spiceworks.com/tech/cloud/articles/artificial-intelligence-as-a-service/

Kowald, C., & Bruns, B. (2022). Chatbot Maxi: A Virtual Certification Trainer in a Blended-Learning Concept. International Journal of Advanced Corporate Learning, 15(2), 34-40. https://doi.org/10.3991/ijac.v15i2.34081

O’Connell, A. (2023, April 19). Why Customer Training is a Critical Component of Customer Community. Retrieved from Litmos : https://www.litmos.com/blog/articles/customer-community-training

Sundararajan, R. (2022, October 6). Why Chatbots are Powerful Tool For Consumer Engagement. Retrieved from Spiceworks: https://www.spiceworks.com/tech/artificial-intelligence/guest-article/why-chatbots-are-powerful-tool-for-consumer-engagement/