Our first workshop: lessons learned and next steps

Introduction to the workshop

On July 27th we held the first workshop of the Conversational Business Chair entitled “How to publish a chatbot in 30 min”. In the workshop, we introduced the first considerations when creating a chatbot which we call, according to the methodology we are developing, “Chatbot contains”.

The session consisted of 2 hours and was attended by almost 50 people which, for the first edition and the short time we had to promote it, we believe it was a great success.

The first workshop has allowed us to evaluate our own competencies as a chair and also to set new challenges for the future.

In this article, we will review our overall impressions, what we have learned and how we will continue to improve in order to offer the best possible learning about chatbots.

Overall impressions of the workshop

Being the first workshop, our resources and promotion time were limited and that was reflected in the scope of the event. Even so, the number of attendees was quite satisfactory, almost 50 people logged in and stayed 2 hours glued to their computer or mobile screens while our speakers explained how to create the most basic level of chatbots.

We were very surprised that the level of interaction was so high. We were delighted with the number of questions that were asked and the interest that was raised. We tried to answer them all as best we could and we think we did a good job in that regard.

One of the goals of our workshops is to introduce the world of chatbots to those who are not normally in this world. For this reason, we sought to invite as many people as possible who had little or no knowledge about chatbots.

The challenge was to get them to understand the potential they could have for their organizations and be able to create their first chatbot.

To get to know the attendees better and verify that our guests were indeed the people we were looking for, the following surveys were conducted:

Survey #1: Which of the following statements do you think best identifies you regarding the value you can get from this workshop?

Where we asked about the goal they would like to achieve with a chatbot.

Survey #2: What is your experience with chatbots? 

Where we sought precisely to confirm that the public that had attended was the one we were looking for.

We were delighted that almost 100% of the attendees responded to these surveys and it helped us to verify that the audience we wanted to reach was exactly the one that attended.

We were also able to assess that the audience was aligned with the Chair’s objectives for knowledge dissemination as most attendees noted that they would like to be able to replicate workshops like this in their settings or organizations.

Overall, participation and attendance aligned with our objectives, which presents us with an excellent starting point to continue to thrive.

Regarding the content, which is another key point we wanted to validate with attendees, we believe we were able to correctly convey the message and knowledge needed to create an entry-level chatbot.

We added a short introduction that ended up being a bit longer than expected due to the large number of questions attendees asked about it. This helped us to understand how to better explain the concepts and the importance of interacting with the audience.

The more “technical” content was planned as a “master class” but we quickly realized that the best way to explain it was to use an example as a common thread throughout the process. This ended up making it much easier to understand the process, helping all attendees to receive our message.

What we learned 

Getting started is never easy, we knew that up front, which is why we set out to learn from each of our actions.

The attendees were not the only ones who learned from the workshop!

Chatbots aside, two important lessons that we are going to integrate are:

• Map all the information from the workshops.
• Broaden the dissemination in the available communication channels.

These two improvements will allow us to reach our desired audience and have the necessary information to improve the disseminated knowledge.

From this first workshop we have learned that the audience liked the workshop and it matches what they were looking for and expecting once they registered.

We will work on making it as practical as possible, using an example as the main thread of the workshop, enhancing interaction and offering all the resources at the end.

What will be the next steps of the Conversational Business Chair?

Our main objective is to prepare thoroughly the following editions, with improvements such as:

• Encourage interactions between attendees and speakers.
• Optimize the contents of the workshops according to the needs and expectations of the attendees.
• Make it simpler and more practical if possible.

We want to give the best information in the best possible way, and we are sure that with our own improvements together with the feedback from the attendees we will take the workshops to a new level.

Therefore, we consider that keeping the satisfaction survey in the following editions of the workshop is an essential point to plan the next steps and improvements of the Chair.

Conclusion

This has been just a small summary of the results of months of preparation for the first workshop.

There have been nerves and high expectations about how it was going to turn out.

But, the results have made all the work worthwhile.

We would like to thank each of the attendees who were encouraged to embark on the adventure of creating chatbots.

We will continue to prepare workshops and content, so… stay tuned to join the next events.

We look forward to seeing you!