Beyond 'chat with the manual' II

At its most basic level, an AI chatbot on WhatsApp is just an easier front end to ChatGPT, with ChatGPT instructed in a particular way and supplemented with particular documents to make it more relevant and reliable for a particular group (like Peruvian microenterprise owners). It will then sit there and wait for questions. But as discussed in a previous post, this "chat with the manual" bot isn't very useful, and won't get much use.

Why? Its placing all of the burden of the user to know what questions to ask, how to use AI, and when. Small business owners are incredibly busy, they have very limited time, and limited experience with technology. Making these tools actually useful and usable isn't their job, its our job.

We're only at the beginning of our experiments to learn how to do this better, but so far have found a few really useful things:

1) A gradual onboarding process. One week after they first connect with Maia, we send them a list of the 3 most common questions across all users in their partiuclar sector, so they get a sense of the breadth of topics they can explore. The next week they get a guide on how to ask better questions to get better answers (provide more context, follow-up questions, etc). Two weeks later, they get a message they can forward to fellow MSME owners to share Maia, if they found it useful. 

2) The 'tip of the week'. Every week, users get a different tip built from the best practice manuals in the knowledge base. This surfaces new ideas to explore that they may not have thought of. Users can then discuss those topics further if they are relevant (with quick reply buttons, which are a must!) and very quickly get to a specific actionable plan to implement a particular improvement that they design with the help of the tool.

3) Follow-up messages. Its one thing to know that we should eat well and exercise, doing it is another matter. Small business owners are busy, and many things come up that may need immediate attention but distract from important but non-urgent things like improvements. If users explored a particular topic the week before and identified some improvements they wanted to make, the following week they will get a follow-up message, to see if they implemented them (and if so, how it went and what are the next steps), and if not, an opportunity to refelct on and possibly revise the plan.