The Gym Group: chatbot
Awards
Bronze Award at DXA’19
Best Digital Change and Transformation: Project/Platform
Marketing Week Masters 2018: Best Digital Transformation Award
Context: I turned The Gym Group’s FAQs into a chatbot – an accessible online alternative to their call centre that let users book classes.
My work: I was part of phase one, gathering all the FAQs and re-writing them into more conversational language within a character limit, and uploading all the content into a QnA Maker to pair questions and answers using tags from user research.
After testing, we started phase two, updating any content based on user feedback and changes to the brand’s tone of voice guidelines. The brand also invested in a plug-in containing over 100 responses to use for the chatbot, so we needed to review it all and merge it with our tested copy to create one source of truth.
Phase one
Wherever possible, we re-wrote the answers from the FAQ page to fit within a 200-character limit for mobile – starting with the most frequently asked questions.
For longer step-by-step responses, we explored accessibility and dialling up the brand’s voice by injecting a short phrase or line at the start or end of each response to help engagement.
Finally, we uploaded all our content into a QnA Maker as one source for UX, copy and development, and paired each version of the question with the response.
QnA maker
Phase two
Optimisation Rounds
We iterated based on user feedback – covering unclear messaging, missed information, and rhetorical responses – and updated all content following new tone of voice (TOV) guidelines.
Chit-Chat
The Gym Group wanted to use a plug-in called ‘Chit-Chat’ to cover any conversational copy that wasn’t gym-related. The plug-in used pre-written content for both the question and the response, like ‘Will you marry me?’, ‘What’s your favourite colour?’ and ‘Do you have any family?’. My task was to review over 100 responses and re-write them to fit the brand’s TOV, selecting which ones felt most appropriate for the goal of the chatbot.
Booking classes
We looked at the conversation structure for booking classes. The chatbot needed the user to say the time, date, location and class information to book a class – and to have the option of changing gyms if the class they wanted wasn’t available in the gym they initially selected.
We tried and tested several versions before using the one shown below. Now the bot automatically looks at classes available the following day at the user’s home gym.
