Help for Heroes: AI Chatbot for Veteran Support
When COVID-19 forced veteran support online, Help for Heroes needed a chatbot to improve website navigation and reduce the burden on their supporter care team.
Key Facts
Client
UK charity supporting injured and sick veterans and their families, shifting to digital support during the 2020 lockdown.
Platform
Google Dialogflow ES with machine learning capabilities, monitored and optimised through the Chatseer analytics platform.
Scale
200+ separate intents with multiple training phrases, covering seven key domains from support to careers.
The brief
During COVID-19 lockdowns, more veterans visited the Help for Heroes website but struggled to find information efficiently. As Marketing Director Jamie Walker noted: "We had a challenge with navigation. We wanted the ability to direct people in a quick, effective, and easy manner."
The supporter care team was receiving excessive phone calls asking basic site navigation questions, reducing their capacity for meaningful veteran support. Help for Heroes needed a solution that could handle routine inquiries around the clock while preserving the human touch for complex cases.
What we built
Meet Tommy
We built Tommy, a helpful and informal AI chatbot powered by Google Dialogflow ES and its machine learning capabilities. Tommy handles over 200 separate intents with multiple training phrases, providing domain-specific FAQ coverage across seven key areas.
- Getting Support: Guiding veterans to the right services and resources
- Donating: Answering questions about how to contribute
- Volunteering: Information about volunteer opportunities
- Fundraising: Support for fundraising activities and campaigns
- Shop: Help with the Help for Heroes online shop
- Careers: Job opportunity information and guidance
- Contact Details: Quick access to the right team or department
Intelligent Conversation Design
Tommy features context awareness through entity extraction, multi-turn conversational flows for complex support inquiries, smalltalk and automatic spelling correction, graceful fallback mechanisms that change responses across three turns, and seamless handoff to human operators when needed. The Chatseer analytics platform provides ongoing monitoring and optimisation data.
Impact
Tommy transformed how veterans interact with the Help for Heroes website, providing frictionless access to support information and freeing the care team to focus on what matters most.
Streamlined Navigation
Veterans can quickly find the information they need without navigating complex site structures.
Freed Support Capacity
Supporter care team capacity previously consumed by basic navigation inquiries redirected to meaningful veteran support.
24/7 Availability
Round-the-clock access to support information for veterans whenever they need it.
Continuous Learning
Machine learning foundation enables ongoing improvement of chatbot intelligence and response quality.
"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
Ready to build something brilliant?
Book a short call and we will map the fastest route to impact.