Prompt Like a Pro - Objectives

How to best set up Bot Objectives in Bot Settings to allow your bot to identify objectives and move through an objective flow.

Conversation objectives are the goals you give your bot to complete. It may be at the bottom of the Bot Settings page, but it shouldn’t be at the bottom of your mind! If your goal for your bot is to qualify your leads, this should be where you spend a lot of your energy.

Conversation Objective Pieces

The conversation objective section is comprised of 5 main parts

• Title – Title of the goal for your own reference

• Description – Description of what the goal is (used by the bot for clarity)

• Objective-Specific Prompt – Optional additional prompt you want the bot to consider only when working on this specific objective

• Sensitivity – How sensitive you want your AI to be when deciding whether or not to complete an objective

• Retry Limit – A limit on the number of times you want AGENT Ai Chat Bot to try accomplishing a goal before it gives up and moves on to the next

• Negative Examples – Examples of lead responses that you feel don’t satisfy the objective

• Positive Example – Example of a lead response that you feel should satisfy the objective

Check out this example of a gym that wants to determine the motivator for an inbound lead. The title “Discover Motivator” is for your own internal tracking, but let’s cover the other 4 items and how to best construct an objective.

Description

The description is extremely important. It’s what determines how your bot understands the objective.

Format

Through iterations of testing, we have found the best description is a short description. The longer you make this, the harder it will be for your bot to find it as satisfied. Keep it short and sweet
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Subtleties

Different descriptions can have drastically different acceptance rates. For example:

approximate timeline for wanting to sell property - The use of the word approximate means the bot is more likely to accept statements like "soon" or "later this year"

timeline for wanting to sell property - The bot will likely look for a specific timeline like "2 weeks" or "2-3 months" before it will be willing to complete this objective based on the description

positive interest in buying the product - The bot will look specifically for a positive confirmation that the person is interested instead of accepting any interest (positive or negative)

interest in buying the product - Leaving "positive" out means the bot will look for any indication whether interested or not interested to determine whether the objective is complete

Sensitivity

This is a feature for the higher tier memberships that allow you to determine how sensitive the bot should be when determining whether or not to complete an objective. The default value is 50. An objective that you want to be super strict about can have a value closer to the upper limit of 99 while objectives you're more relaxed about can have a value closer to the lower limit of 1.

Retry Limit

Sometimes you have an objective that you may want, but don't want it to hold up the lead qualification process. You can make objectives optional by setting a retry limit. This is a limit on the number of times your bot will attempt to accomplish the objective before moving on to the next one.

Objective-Specific Prompt

Each objective has its own prompt field! This prompt area behaves just like the main prompt, but is only visible to the bot while it’s working on this specific objective. This is your time to give the bot extra clarity or information specific to this stage in the lead conversation. Examples on what to put here:

• Extra clarification on the objective description

• If doing cold text marketing, let the bot know on your first objective not to use spam trigger words and phrases

• Explicit instructions on how you want to bot to respond if the lead is not interested in continuing conversation at that step

Negative Examples

The next section allows you to add up to seven examples of what the lead might say and how you would want the bot to respond. In this section you can also rate whether you want the bot to pass or fail this example and its satisfaction of your objective. Let's look at another example from the fitness bot objective Discover Motivator

The description of this objective is reason for reaching out to start fitness. You can see all of the examples with the ❌ are examples where we don't want the bot to satisfy the objective. The example with the ✅ is above our sensitivity rating so that would pass the objective! Users on the Basic or Free plans can click the icons to toggle satisfactory or unsatisfactory while higher tier plans can edit the fine-tuned rating number.

Positive Example Note

It’s a good idea when giving your passing example(s), you give at least one passing example that's vague to show the bot that it doesn't have to look solely for responses that CLEARLY satisfy the goal. It can accept gray area answers too.

Here the bot has to read between the nuances in speech to understand that the lead response “I’m not as happy as I’d like with how I look” means they are reaching out because they want help with improving their diet or exercise. On the contrary, if you used an example like “I’m reaching out to start fitness because I want to be more fit” the bot may be more strict on what kinds of responses it will accept as satisfactory.

Adding, Removing, Moving Objectives

You'll notice priority levels within the Objective Section. AGENT Ai Chat Bot will move sequentially through these priority levels to accomplish objectives, but any objectives that have tied priority will be attacked in the conversational order that makes the most sense based on the conversation up to that point.

For example, in this image we can see the bot will always determine timeline first, then decide whether to move onto "motivation" or "condition" next. Imagine the conversation about timeline went like this:

AI: Happy to see you're giving us a shot at being the buyer for your place. Mind if I ask when you're hoping to have the sale done?

Lead: As soon as possible, can't stand living in this mess anymore.

The lead already mentioned something relating to the property condition here, so the bot will likely move on to gathering details about the property condition before moving on to motivation.

Summary

In our experience, it’s important to keep in mind that people have a limited attention span. It’s highly beneficial that AGENT Ai Chat Bot responds quickly in an engaging manner, but still if you pile on too many goals, the lead will likely get bored of the conversation and drop off. Consider using the bot to qualify your leads with the objectives that are most important to you, then pass them off to a person who can give them a call. In this way your people are spending more time speaking with qualified leads instead of sifting through the nonsense of tire kickers.