Business value
- Efficiency: Deflect repetitive tickets, speed up first response, and triage accurately.
- Revenue: Guide users to purchase, recover abandoned carts, and qualify leads.
- Insights: Turn conversations into product signals via analytics and feedback loops.
Core Skills to Look For
Technical competencies
- NLP & LLMs: intent detection, entity extraction, prompt design, LLM fine-tuning, RAG with vector databases.
- Tooling: Dialogflow CX, Rasa, Microsoft Bot Framework, LangChain, FastAPI/Node for middleware.
- Integrations: CRM/helpdesk (Zendesk, Intercom), payment, calendars, search, internal APIs.
- Quality & safety: evaluation suites, guardrails, red-team tests, rate limiting, privacy/PII controls.
- Deployment: serverless/functions, containerisation, observability, low-latency inference.
Collaboration & product sense
- Conversation design, tone, and escalation rules; works with support/product to define success metrics.
Platform & Architecture Choices
Common approaches
- Menu/intent bots: deterministic, great for high-volume simple flows.
- LLM-enhanced bots: natural language, grounded with RAG over your docs/DB; use tools/actions for fulfilment.
- Voice bots: telephony or WebRTC with streaming ASR/TTS; requires tighter latency budgets.
Where AI Chatbots Shine
- Customer support: self-service, order status, returns, warranty.
- Sales & marketing: lead qualification, product fit Q&A, guided demos.
- Internal ops: HR/IT assistants, policy lookup, workflow shortcuts.
- Knowledge access: natural-language search over manuals, contracts, or wikis.
Hiring Process (Lean & High-Signal)
Step-by-step
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Define outcomes
- Example: “Cut first-response time by 40% and deflect 30% of Tier-1 contacts.”
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Screening checklist
- Portfolio with shipped chatbots, before/after metrics, readable docs.
- Evidence of eval harnesses (accuracy, containment rate, CSAT) and safe-response design.
- Integrations with your stack (CRM, helpdesk, payments, internal APIs).
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Practical task (4–6 hours cap)
- Build a small RAG bot over a provided FAQ; include prompts, evals, fallback/escalation, and a latency budget.
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Live review
- Pair on adding a tool (order lookup), discuss retries, caching, and monitoring.
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Security review
- PII handling, data retention, secrets, abuse protection, and audit logs.
Evaluation Metrics & Analytics
What to track
- Containment rate (solved without escalation)
- FRT/ART (first/average response time)
- Resolution rate & CSAT
- Hallucination/guardrail violations
- Cost per conversation and latency (p95)
Best Practices
Engineering & ops checklist
- Structured prompts; retrieval grounding with chunking, citations, and freshness policies.
- Tiered fallbacks (re-ask → reformulate → human handoff) with transcript context.
- Canary rollouts, feature flags, and kill-switches.
- Versioned knowledge base; scheduled re-indexing and drift monitoring.
- Clear runbooks and playbooks for support teams.
30–60–90 Day Plan
- 30 days: Discovery, sample dialogs, baseline bot with FAQ + handoff; set up analytics and alerts.
- 60 days: Add RAG over docs/DB, integrate CRM/helpdesk, introduce evaluations and red-team tests.
- 90 days: Optimise latency/cost (caching, smaller models, batching), expand intents/tools, publish ROI report.
Page Updated: 2025-10-06