Imagine stepping into a digital wilderness, an AI that roams freely, tossing out half-baked answers, sometimes insightful, often baffling. This was the reality we faced with our Intercom AI. But just like taming a wild animal, we knew we could teach it. This is the story of how we tamed our wild AI and transformed it into Dassie, the wise, witty wombat who now guides our users through the DAS platform.
The Problem: A Chaotic Chatbot
Our journey began with the discovery that our AI chatbot was, to put it kindly, a bit of a wild card. Users would ask for help, and instead of clear answers, they got a chaotic mix of half-truths and confused guesses. It wasn’t just a problem of bad answers, it was a problem of understanding.
The Research Phase: Discovering LLMs
Curious to know why our AI struggled so much, I began digging. That’s when I discovered that our chatbot was powered by a Large Language Model (LLM) called Claude, developed by Anthropic. But what’s an LLM? Simply put, an LLM is like a super librarian, it reads everything it’s trained on and answers questions based on that knowledge. But it can only answer well if it’s taught well.
Rebuilding Our Knowledge Base: Seeing with Text
This was our first step in teaching the AI. Originally, our guides were heavily image-based, clear to the human eye but a nightmare for an AI with no vision. It was like trying to teach someone with a blindfold using only gestures.
So, we transformed our guides. Instead of "click the search button and enter your address" with a picture, we wrote:
- Navigate to the magnifying glass icon in the top right of the DAS interface.
- Left-click to open your search options.
- Choose the search category you want to use.
We quickly learned that in the world of AI, clarity is king. If you put low effort into your instructions, you get low-quality results. This principle became our guiding light.
Teaching Context: Making Sense of the Platform
But even with clear instructions, our AI was still lost when dealing with complex workflows. That’s because not all DAS users have the same access or tasks. A banking user doesn’t need the same guidance as an insurance agent.
The solution? Internal articles that taught our AI about user roles, permissions, and specialized workflows. We connected the AI’s understanding to the roles embedded in our platform, allowing it to understand who had access to what and provide role-specific advice.
The Clippy Epiphany: Personifying the AI
Yet something was still missing. Our AI felt like a lifeless tool – accurate, but soulless. Users needed more than just instructions; they needed a friendly guide.
Enter the Microsoft Clippy inspiration. We remembered how Clippy made help fun by being a recognizable, charming character. So, we decided to create a DAS mascot – a personality that could transform our AI into a friendly, approachable guide.
The Birth of Dassie: Our Wise Wombat
We wanted a mascot that was wise, friendly, and unmistakably Australian. Our team’s ideas ranged from clever cockatoos to trusty sheepdogs, but the winner was Dassie, a wise, friendly wombat.
Dassie wears glasses to show his wisdom and sports DAS colors proudly in his fur. As a wombat, he’s an unassuming but essential part of the ecosystem, just like our work in digital agriculture.
The Results: A Tamed, Trustworthy Guide
Since Dassie’s introduction, users have been asking clearer questions, and our AI’s answers have become sharper and more accurate. Our knowledge base is now a source of pride. Dassie now sports a wonderful 85% +/- solution rate for all the conversations that come through our platform, leaving the more challenging issues to be immediately handed over to our customer success team.
We are beyond happy with this result because when the AI first started, we were in the low 50s, and interactions were not enjoyable for our clients, leading us to occasionally switch it off. Our knowledge base’s quality has hugely improved. Not only do our guides have videos and imagery, but they also have highly detailed, curated text guidance. This has more than tripled our users' usage of the knowledge base, with 2,880 article views in the last 12 months – which totals more than our previous 3 years combined.
Additionally, we now receive compliments on our articles, whereas before, we were told they were lacking or very simple.
Dassie isn’t just a bot. He’s our wise, witty wombat – a friendly face in the digital wilderness, always ready to help, because when you put quality into your AI, you get quality back. So here are some words from Dassie!
A Big Thank You to Intercom
We couldn’t have achieved this without Intercom, a fantastic CRM tool that fits seamlessly into our DAS product suite. It’s not just a tool – it’s the backbone of our customer communication, making our journey with Dassie possible.
Written by Kiera Pearson, Customer Success Manager at DAS.