The people behind the bots — Michelle Parayil
Michelle Parayil, Senior Conversation Designer at Haptik gives insight into how she got into Conversational AI and what’s helped her along the way.
Q1 — What drew you to the Conversational AI industry?
Michelle: I happened to join Haptik when the company shifted from a B2C chat assistant app to a B2B Conversational AI platform in 2017. Conversational AI solves a real need in the current customer support industry and has the power to help millions of people around the world — which is what Haptik’s primary focus is.
The domain requires a combination of copywriting, product thinking, UX design, psychology, linguistics, and so much more. There’s also so much yet to be discovered as the user base keeps growing, so I’m learning every single day. Ultimately, a mix of being at the right company at the right time and having a transferrable skillset really helped.
Q2 — What skills or transferable skills helped you when entering this space?
Michelle: My copywriting skills, the empathy and customer focused-thinking that comes from being a marketer, and some of the technical know-how from my engineering-degree days.
Q3 — Were there any specific resources, tools, industry experts, that helped you along the way?
Michelle: Conversation Design is such a new industry but a prolific one for sure. I love all the Conversation Design resources that the Google Conversation Design team puts out. Here’s the link.
The Conversation Design Institute folks have some excellent resources.
But over time, it’s been a lot of learning through our own experiences and mistakes, especially given that Haptik is focused on chat-based experiences for enterprise customers.
Q4 — In a sentence or two tell us what your role entails
Michelle: A Conversation Designer is responsible for designing the user experience of a virtual assistant. They ensure that the virtual assistant is conversationally engaging, impactful for the end-user, and matches the brand’s voice. They translate the brand’s business requirements into natural dialogue flows backed up by UX research and good design practices.
Q5 — What do you enjoy most about your role?
Michelle: I enjoy what I do as it’s challenging and gratifying at the same time because you’re helping so many people. After all, a chatbot can scale up massively. My role also needs me to use so much of my skill set, be it writing good copy, designing a brand’s entire chat-support strategy, creating training programs, and even contributing to our platform’s tech stack.
Q6 — What is the most challenging part of your role?
Michelle: Knowing that a small conversation design mistake could ruin someone’s day is challenging. Let’s face it, seeking customer support is nobody’s idea of fun, and receiving a wrong, frustrating answer from an automated system is plain aggravating. I always have that voice in the back of my mind.
Q7 — What excites you about the future of this industry?
Michelle: Conversational AI has so many facets and hypotheses that are yet to be proved. I’m excited to see how we scale up to meet the next billion users through multilingual experiences. Another capability that we’ve been exploring is omnichannel experiences because customers today aren’t just calling or texting brands through their websites. They’re everywhere — be it social media like Twitter or Facebook or personal messaging channels like WhatsApp or saying hi on Google Business Messages. I’m genuinely interested to see how we conversation designers adapt to these!
Q8 — What is one piece of advice you would give to other people looking to enter this industry?
Michelle: Be bold and jump right in! Conversational AI companies are looking for multi-talented people who can help their products and customers in so many different ways. There are so many platforms, Conversation Design tools, and resources out there, so there’s truly nothing stopping you from creating your first chatbot and joining the fray.
Techires’ takeaways:
- There are so many transferrable skills into Conversation Design, making it a highly diverse and inclusive industry.
- There are huge amounts of amazing resources out there, with the Conversation Design Institute being one of them! Use our code TECHIRE for 25% off your next course.
- We love Michelle’s advice on being bold and jumping right in — we couldn’t agree more!
Thank you for reading! A special thanks to our guest, Michelle. We really enjoyed hearing Michelle’s insights, and hope you did too! Click here to follow Michelle on LinkedIn!
If you’re keen to hear more insights and advice from industry experts in the Conversational AI space, don’t forget to click the follow button to be notified of future posts!
You can also head over to our socials for more tips and advice from the team at techire ai and if you’re looking for roles within Conversational AI check out our jobs page and website.
And if you’d be interested in taking part in our blog series get in touch, we’d love to hear from you!
Allys Parsons — Conversational AI Recruiter @ Co-Founder @ techire ai
Leigh Smith — Conversational AI Recruiter @ techire ai
