Background
Backed by Nikkei and the Financial Times, Excedo combines Business English soft skills development, and cross-cultural understanding in an effective & engaging learning solution for global business professionals.
In 2018, I began a consulting project with Excedo to help them to implement and develop effective business cases to scale one on one English language instruction. Eventually I worked with them on a year long project to manage and build their chatbot and messaging capability for their Android and iOS apps.
Problem
The company was looking to implement specific chatbot use cases that would increase user engagement but more importantly operational scalability that included:
- Customer support
- Learner self help
- Content creation (CMS)
Technical Solution
From my time at Rikai Labs, I had become an expert in the chatbot scripting language Rivescript. Using my expertise in this area, I implemented:
- A passive, more responsive chatbot experience
- A customer support alerting system to identify when learners required assistance
- A content management system that quickly allowed new content to be created and deployed for different personas
Prototyping
While the scripting language allowed me to mock up prototypes, it still required that I be able to see the chatbot in action in the app. So I worked with Sr DevOps engineers to create a local and cloud based Docker environment that let us prototype for:
- Stakeholder approval
- Internal testing
- Customer test and feedback
Results
The results of my efforts were that:
- We could deploy content and messaging for new classes 4X faster
- Docker environment for prototyping UI and UX
- Responsive chatbot that filtered messages and cut down on spam 95%