Things You Need to Know When Building Your Chatbot

In our previous article about how every business needs a chatbot, we talked about the benefits of a chatbot, and how they can help to enhance your customer engagement level which traffics more customers to your website, bringing you more business.

While building a chatbot (without the need to code anything) may sound easy, getting your chatbot to learn and resolve customer queries isn’t something that could be achieved overnight.

Today, let us delve deeper into the implementation of your chatbot, and the things we should take into consideration when building one. This ensures the best user experience for your customers when they use your chatbot.

1. Make your chatbot friendly and welcoming

Many customers are unaware of the fact that the customer support whom they are chatting with is, in fact, chatbots. The chatbots’ way of interaction has become so ‘human-like’; just as how businesses built their chatbot to be – approachable and ‘friendly.’

It is essential to make your chatbot welcoming and offer a sense of familiarity for your customers as you would want to achieve high customer satisfactory experience when they interact with your chatbot. Besides being able to answer your customer queries, it is relatively essential to build the right ‘behavior’ of your chatbot.

You could do this by crafting welcome messages that fit your brand image or program your chatbot to talk like your target audience. You might also want to include Call-To-Action (CTA) buttons when designing your chatbot conversations. To make your chatbot more ‘human-like,’ you should also try to create a natural language flow in the discussions.

2. Focus on designing the conversation

The main thing about designing a chatbot is the conversation between the bot and your customer. Craft messages with impactful words and ensure a natural flow in the conversation. With different user journeys and intents in mind, you should always think about how a conversation should begin and end. To guide your chatbot and user along with the conversation, include buttons and quick replies so that you could help your user reach the end-point of the communication.

A chatbot without natural flow would not be value-adding to your business and might even direct your users to the wrong answers for their inquiries. This would be the last thing you would want to happen, ever (think: customer dissatisfaction).

Let’s illustrate an example: You are trying to reserve a movie ticket and have selected your choice of movie. Next, your chatbot asks you your preferred timing, and you reply, “What are the available timings?”. Because this has not been programmed into the chatbot, the chatbot replies, “Sorry, could you rephrase your question?”. The conversation has ended, and you would need to restart the whole conversation to reserve your movie ticket. This is undoubtedly frustrating for the user.

3. Human Assistance

Another essential thing that you should know when building your chatbot is to include a ‘human assistance’ function, in any case where the chatbot isn’t able to answer the user’s question. Your chatbot may be able to handle the simple issues, and this provides the user with quick and immediate replies. However, for complex problems, there is a need for a human to ‘takeover.’ Your aim is to enhance better user experience – hence you will need a ‘fallback’ when your chatbot is ‘lost’ in the conversation.

Lastly, do not rush into designing your chatbot, it takes time for your bot to learn – and for that to happen, you need to feed it with data and live conversations.

Ultimately, designing a chatbot is about creating the perfect balance between Artificial Intelligence (or machine-learning) and creating a natural conversation flow. The user experience would not be the best, without either of these elements.