After finishing my course in chatbot design with the Pogo Booking Bot prototype, I had the idea to develop another chatbot. This bot would give craft beer bars an extra way to give customers beer recommendations and allow them to order at the same time.
š¤Ā Take a sneak peek at the interactive chatbot prototype.
(As this is a prototype, thereās only button input to guide a specific happy path that leads to ordering 2 pints of Sierra Nevada Pale Ale. In real life, bar guests would be able to choose from the entire menu š»)
I love discovering craft beer bars and trying new flavors from different breweries. The vast beer menu in craft beer places can often be quite overwhelming, and the staff doesn't always have the time to give you a proper recommendation. On busy days, when there are other clients waiting to order, you don't want to slow down the bartender by asking too many questions. So you take a shot in the dark, hoping you'll like what you get.
Hence my idea to let a chatbot offer some help and give recommendations, based on the userās preferences. In addition, it would be great to allow the customer to order the recommended beers through the chatbot and even have the staff come and bring it to their table.
This was a small passion project that was supposed to address a pain point that I'm personally experiencing when visiting craft beer places. This is why I didn't conduct a lot of research, but tailored the experience to my personal needs and the needs of the other beer lovers I have talked to the past several years.
However, if this wasn't a fictional project, I would spend quite some time on research, by interviewing customers and bar owners, and by digging into online conversations about beer and bar experiences. This would give me a deeper understanding of the criteria beer geeks use to select a beer in a bar.
I would also research existing chatbots that "work" in the hospitality industry and see what the best practices are in the industry. I'm sure that I would discover many best practices, necessary functionalities, and would have my assumptions challenged.
I started off by defining several values for the Beertender chatbot. These values are my perception of what many bar owners would like to see appear in a chatbot that serves customers in their name. I tried to stay true to these as much as possible when designing the conversational experience.
I started to plan the potential conversations users might have with the chatbot.
I created a flow chart with the different paths for the user to get a beer recommendation and potentially order the beer through the chatbot experience. This helped a lot during the actual writing of the dialogues.
Check out the entire flow chart
Beertender dialogue flows
After the planning, the writing. As for the Pogo Airline chatbot, I also used the script template, developed by Hillary Black, which contains instructions for developers on how to implement the different paths.