Naming your gambits

I thought I’d share some thoughts I had on Gambit naming here. When I first started, I was rather lax with what I named my gambits, opting for cryptic names that would mostly only make sense to me, but then I realized I was building a bot for a large institution. And I had also developed a multi-tiered customer management system that (essentially) functions as a lead/gen that generates reports for multiple departments under varying subjects lines. Customers would submit questions/comments/etc. under different subjects. These reports would then be sent out based on which path they had taken. Now an employee would receive the report to handle the customer’s comments, but they would have to read down the TARS report to collect all their contact information, important entry information, and their specific comments. I realized that the employee reading the report had to be considered just as much as the customer submitting the information. This is when I learned that simplifying my gambit names was crucial.

When you are referencing previous user submissions, it makes your life much simpler if your code is {{ursp.Name}} than {{ursp.User_Name_Submission_for_Contact_List}}. You can see in a separate topic where this can be a problem here This also cuts down on mistakes and maintenance. And the employee that reads the report sees:

Name John Smith
Email Jsmith@gmail.com
Address 90 Jump Ln Erehwon, USA

The report is simple and easy for the employee to follow and reference. The same is true if you are the Chat bot builder, and you are tracking user movements through your TARS reports. If you have multiple gambits that are over 3 words, you will be dealing yourself a great disservice as you try and read through them (especially if there is subtle difference between each gambit name phrase). Headache anyone?

My advice would be to stay focused to one or two words and/or use numbers to differentiate subtle option choices that are linked to a main subject choice like: “Is this your bike or your friend’s bike?” First choice leads to gambit named “Bike”. Second choice leads to gambit named “Bike2”. Or if you would like a better description while still keeping it simple: “Mybike”, “Theirbike”.

Cheers!

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