Robots can also serve humanitarian causes

This particular chatbot was programmed with more than 130 frequently asked questions from donors and the general public, and during December, the month in which the Telethon takes place, interactions increase 70%. But Yolín is not the only chatbot.

World Visionthe NGO that seeks to transform the lives of children in vulnerable situations, also developed a chatbot together with IBM and NDS Cognitive Labs called Bob that allows you to be in contact with all stakeholders.

According to data from the NGO, in less than a year Bob has served more than 2,500 donors, with a service time of just two minutes, in addition, 39% of these requests were made during non-working hours, which allowed providing a better attention.

In the case of the UNICEFin 2020 they enabled a chatbot called U-Report which had more than 7 million interactions, which were made by 6 million people in 52 different countries to answer specific questions about the coronavirus.

How NGOs can use Artificial Intelligence and chatbots

Leticia Jimenez, Marketing Manager at World Vision Mexico, shared that 97% of donor conversations have been fully resolved by Bob. She also commented that with this type of technology they seek to bring the new generations closer to being interested in the donation culture to generate social impacts.

According to Gustavo Parés, general director of NDS cognitive, there are three main advantages of implementing chatbots in an NGO. The first, to provide relevant information and publicize the objective, spirit and particular goals of the NGO.

Although most chatbots are currently reactive, that is, they answer when a person asks them a question, they can also appear automatically and provide this type of information when the user enters the page.

The second reason, because it becomes an “operative relief”. For example, if you start doing more events or campaigns, not only can you serve more people more efficiently, but they can also have the metrics and data to track later.

However, he also highlighted that all this data adheres to the privacy and confidentiality notice of each NGO, so it is important that users know how this information will be used according to each instance and that NGOs have cybersecurity to protect these data. data.

Finally, the maintenance and growth of the relationship. For example, in the case of World Vision, Jiménez shared that they are working so that donors can ask more specific questions about the children they are supporting, as well as have updated information on how their donation is being used.

Chatbots, can they be ‘more human’?

A banking chatbot cannot be “funny”; while an NGO chatbot cannot be frivolous and aloof either. This is well known by Huibert Aalbers, regional IT architecture leader for Latin America at IBM, who mentioned that when developing a chatbot, “personality” becomes very important.

A chatbot’s personality is the set of human-like characteristics that the chatbot exhibits in order to be more identifiable and attractive to users. It is defined by several factors, such as tone of voice, sense of humor, and level of formality.

Parés shared that another important factor when developing a chatbot is the “sentiment analysis” (sentiment analysis). This is in charge of evaluating the interactions of the users with the chatbot, such as the tone and the words they use to understand how they feel.

For example, if a user types something like “I’m upset” and the chatbot responds that it doesn’t understand, it will get more annoyed. However, if the chatbot replies that she understands the situation and transfers you to an agent so she can help you, the interaction can be more successful.