Conversations are for Closers
Octane AI Convos: It’s the script that matters
Today is launch day for Octane AI’s Convos feature, which lets bot-builders add interactive stories to their bots’ repertoires. The pop band Maroon 5 had served as a beta-test guinea pig, using a pre-launch version of Convos to build advance interest for their broken-hearted Valentine’s Day single, “Cold.” (Octane AI publishes Chatbots magazine, but the only input they have on my posts is fact-checking. And sending me emoji in Slack.)
Tinkering with Convos this past week (you can try one here — it will open Facebook Messenger) reinforced a critical point made by founders of other bot startups in interviews for my State of Chatbots posts. However complex a bot’s self-directing algorithms are, it’s still a human mind — more likely a team of them — that must program those algorithms in the first place. It’s up to humans to choose wisely what a bot does, and does not do, to meet their goals.
Convos’ name comes from Millennial thumb-type slang for “conversations,” but to be clear, it doesn’t employ conversational artificial intelligence — machine learning based on millions of training examples. Convos is what bot makers call “rule-based” — instead of training and number-crunching, it follows a script written by humans, with specific actions and responses to a limited set of input options it offers, rather than trying to calculate what every word means in the larger conversational context.
Most bot clients today want to use bots to automate marketing and sales. But as technologists cruelly joke, the best salesperson isn’t always the smartest. That’s not what matters. More important, they know how to push the emotional buttons every human being has, so that a purchase or brand loyalty becomes the customer’s idea, their decision, one they believe in themselves.
What works for closers — the people who run circles around everyone else in sales — isn’t complex language processing or deep domain knowledge, it’s skill at appealing to human emotions.
I learned this firsthand while canvassing for the Maine Democratic Party in the state’s rural areas last fall. We had one goal: Get people to show up and vote. We focused on local residents known to be leaning our way, but not listed in public records as having cast a ballot in past elections.
How do you swing a voter to actually vote? I walked in with enough overthinking for the whole team, decades of experience as a reporter talking to strangers and constructing fact-based arguments, all topped with my Silicon Valley attitude that a smart person will figure out anything better than people who’ve been doing it for ten or twenty years. We’ll disrupt the canvassing incumbents! We’ll ignore the idiotic script our field organizer gave us, and innovate on the spot!
A few days into the job, the gratingly gruff field organizer walked over to my seat and told me brusquely, in front of everyone: “You need to stick to the script.” He said it in the tone of, “ — or you’re fired, right now.” He had just booted a far more experienced canvasser who had ignored the rules.
So I stuck to the stupid script. Sigh. My success rate — people committing to vote instead of hanging up the phone or slamming the door — instantly doubled. The average time I spent talking to each potential voter fell to a fraction of what I had been spending. Rural residents stopped talking politics in their doorways, and started committing to vote on the spot.
Why? Because that script, which to an educated writer for elitist media outlets seemed simpleminded and embarrassingly unoriginal, was written by people whose lives are consumed by figuring out what gets people to the polls.
It’s not sophistication, information, or compelling logic that wins. It’s emotional pushbuttons, directly pressed: “Can I count on you to join your neighbors and vote on November 8th?” Eye contact. Shut up and wait for an answer. As soon as they say “Yes,” it’s time to get off their property. But first, make eye contact again with a sincerely enthusiastic, “Great! See you there!”
The script I had rolled my eyes at worked like I could not believe. I swung by the polls on Election Day and was greeted by voters I’d canvassed. They chided me for not being there sooner. I’d poked their sense of civic duty. It was in the script.
So as much as I’d love to meet a Facebook chatbot that gets to know me better every time I come back, tells me exactly why I’m awesome, and can navigate my love/hate relationship with Maroon 5, I know what’s going to make for a successful brand-building, shoe-selling chatbot: It needs to know how to close a customer. For that, it doesn’t matter so much which bot you buy, as who writes your script.
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