How BotForge Built Tommy, a Chatbot for Help for Heroes

When lockdown moved veteran support online, Help for Heroes' supporter care team was taking too many calls about finding things on the website. BotForge built Tommy, a chatbot that answers routine questions around the clock.

BotForge for Help for Heroes

Help for Heroes

Client: Help for Heroes
Agency: BotForge, part of Cohaesus
Type of work: AI & chatbots
Sector: Public Sector & Charities
Scope: Conversation design, Dialogflow ES, chatbot persona, human handoff, Chatseer analytics

Help for Heroes is a UK charity supporting injured and sick veterans and their families. During the 2020 lockdown, its support moved online.

The Challenge

More veterans visited the Help for Heroes website during lockdown, but many struggled to find what they needed. The supporter care team was taking large numbers of calls with basic questions about finding things on the site, which left less time for meaningful support. The charity wanted to direct people quickly and easily, handling routine enquiries around the clock while keeping a human touch for complex cases.

The Approach

BotForge built Tommy, a helpful, informal chatbot on Google Dialogflow ES. Tommy handles more than 200 intents, each with multiple training phrases, across seven areas:

Getting support
Donating
Volunteering
Fundraising
The online shop
Careers
Contact details

Tommy uses entity extraction for context, multi-turn flows for complex support enquiries, small talk and automatic spelling correction. When it cannot help, it varies its fallback responses over three turns and then hands over to a person. The Chatseer analytics platform monitors performance and guides improvements.

There was no fluff in the cost, timeline, or anything else. The time we paid for went into actually building the bot.

Jamie Walker, Marketing Director, Help for Heroes

The Outcome

Veterans can now find support information quickly, at any hour, without working through a complex site. Time the supporter care team used to spend on navigation questions now goes to veteran support, and Tommy keeps improving as it learns.