Multi-Platform AI Chatbot Integration

In a previous role, I had the opportunity to maintain and enhance a customer-facing sales chatbot that integrated multiple platforms - Google Dialogflow, Five9 VCC, and Salesforce CRM - to streamline lead capture and improve customer interactions.

The Challenge

The company wanted to offer visitors to the main website an easy way to get answers to common questions and submit their information without waiting for a sales rep. We needed a chatbot that could:

• Provide quick and accurate responses to common inquiries

• Collect basic customer information via a user-friendly interface

• Integrate seamlessly with the call center and CRM systems

The Solution: Multi-Platform Chatbot Integration

I collaborated with a web developer and a Five9 specialist to deliver a chat widget on the company website. Here’s how the system worked end-to-end:

1. Customer Interaction: Visitors use the chat widget to ask questions and submit their contact information through a simple form embedded in the chat.

2. Five9 Integration: The chatbot sends lead information to Five9, the cloud-based VCC that manages customer interactions and routing.

3. NLP with Google Dialogflow: Conversations were processed using Google Dialogflow’s natural language processing capabilities, allowing the bot to understand user intent and provide relevant responses.

4. Salesforce Lead Routing: Five9 then passed the enriched lead data to Salesforce, ensuring the sales team received accurate, actionable information for timely follow-up.

My Role: Training and Enhancing the Chatbot

I was responsible for maintaining and improving this chatbot integration:

• Training the Bot: Analyzing historical conversation logs to identify gaps and ensure the chatbot responded accurately and helpfully

• Scenario Development: Creating new conversational flows, including routing and responses in Dialogflow and Five9 Studio, to handle evolving customer questions and needs.

• Cross-Platform Coordination: Optimizing the integration and user experience across platforms.

What I Learned:

🌸 Designing and managing conversational AI systems

🌸 Integrating chatbots with complex multi-platform workflows

🌸 Utilizing NLP to improve customer engagement

🌸 Connecting real-time customer data with Salesforce CRM

Reflections

The most challenging part of the setup was adding new types of scenarios / interactions for the chatbot in Five9 Studio (separate from the VCC admin center). Their UI and available nodes were somewhat less intuitive to me than Salesforce Flow and other tools. Adding an additional Q&A was easy, because the routing was already there to support it. But adding a new type of interaction, like a zip code and service area comparison, was more complex. All the heavy lifting, at least to my eyes, was done in the Five9 Studio.