When developing chatbots for automating support services to handle inquiries from both consumers and employees, there are two main approaches: rule-based (linear) and natural language understanding (NLU).
In the case of rule-based logic, the user's interaction with the chatbot is predetermined by pre-designed scenarios (dialogue trees), and navigation within the interface occurs through buttons. When using an NLU module, the user has the ability to send their question as text to the chatbot, after which the NLU module processes it, finds the most appropriate answer in the knowledge base, and provides it to the user. This creates the illusion of communicating with a real person, enhancing user loyalty and allowing a larger number of questions to be processed within the chatbot. This is because the number of buttons on a single screen is often limited both by the channel and by usability concerns (UX).