Be it customer service, marketing, food service, or healthcare, chatbots can be implemented across various sectors to assist customers. For example, they can help answer frequently asked questions and even carry out complex conversations to handle customer complaints. That’s why it’s predicted that by 2022, organizational spending on AI systems and data technologies like chatbots will comprise almost $77.6 billion.
But while chatbots are helping to streamline business processes, sometimes companies can misunderstand their functionality, leading to poor performance and frustration among customers. This is why it’s crucial to optimize your chatbots and implement them the right way. In this article, we’ll discuss how businesses can create a better bot experience for their customers and eliminate common chatbot user mistakes.
Train your chatbot
Suppose you want to make chatbots part of your customer service team. In that case, you have to train and optimize your chatbot’s functionality to understand customer queries and preferences.
Open-source data such as Twitter Support can lay the foundation for chatbot optimization and development. It can increase your chatbot’s knowledge base by teaching it some of the common questions that customers may ask. However, open-source data can be pretty generic and may not reflect your particular brand and associated queries.
What’s more, machine learning models may fail to recognize similarly-phrased questions even within the same conversation. That can be detrimental if you’re trying to establish a consistent brand personality.
This is why it is essential to collect your company’s conversational data as well. A personalized, unique data-set can give your chatbot more information about your business. Chatbots can then translate these data sets into specific customer requests with exact answers for each query.
Personify your chatbot
GIving your bot a personality is an excellent way of communicating your brand’s personality beyond just logos, symbols, and design. It can also make customers more likely to engage with your chatbot and prevent it from falling into error loops.
For a unique chatbot personality, first, segment your customers into different categories. This will help you give a unique language and conversational script to each chatbot you assign to each customer category. For example, a chatbot for customers ages 20 and below can be equipped to use emojis in their answer scripts.
Understanding your audience’s hobbies, interests and ages will help you more fluently converse with particular audiences. Research shows that 87% of millennials believe the success of an organization depends on more than just its financial performance. This translates to customer experience and how well a brand communicates with its customer.
If all your chatbot does is collect information and copy from various databases, it will be difficult to create a consistent persona that can engage and delight. When you gather customer insights, use them to help train your bots to behave in a way that targets customer needs and shows the value of your brand. Similarly, if you have a creative brand, consider using emojis and have a personalized, colorful interface for your chatbot.
Write engaging dialogues
There are many strategies for writing engaging content for your website, and bots are no different. There’s a significant difference between a chatbot simply answering questions and keeping customers engaged with answers. Engaging a customer means the chatbot provides valuable information with every answer script but also keeps the customer curious about other products or services.
Many businesses make the mistake of writing a clever script way too early. Remember to first understand what your customers are looking for and what they hope to achieve from the conversation. Only then can you develop answers according to each customer journey and scenario.
You can also use A/B testing to find out which dialogue resonates best with your customers and whether bots are improving conversion rates. If two different kinds of answer scripts are displayed to customers over time, the answer script with the highest conversions will emerge as the more suitable one to use permanently.
Enable the self-service option
Often when customers stumble upon a website, they don’t know that they have the option of conversing with a chatbot. So make sure you make it immediately clear on your landing page that customers have a self-service option available.
It is important to give the customer a choice between opting for self-service or talking to a customer representative. Being offered a choice makes them feel valued and in control of their choices. A bot can also be a lot more efficient for quick inquiries, and this will save your representatives time to focus on more in-depth interactions.
Create a global appeal
If you have a global brand, you must support your customers worldwide. According to recent surveys, 80% of companies are already using chatbots or planning to do so, so it’s essential to optimize their chatbot behavior to interact with different customer demographics.
You should equip your chatbot with translation capabilities, along with the ability to learn complex words and phrases in different languages. The problem arises when chatbot supporting technologies require a new language rebuild or complex supporting platform that may lead to a fragmented, disparate solution system.
Installing these chatbot solutions can be costly for an organization and might not be supported by customers’ devices. So ideally, training your chatbot in multiple languages may be more manageable and effective.
Test and optimize
Once you have trained your chatbot, remember to conduct regular functional tests that provide information on conversation flows, user experience, the accuracy of answers, and speed of response. Ask for customer feedback, and make a conscious effort to improve the chatbot experience for customers.
Here are a few testing strategies you can use:
Intelligence Testing: This is an assessment of how well your chatbot is equipped to understand things like customer’s emojis, idioms, and questions. It also means how well the chatbot can recall specific information or keywords used during a conversation.
Conversational Flow Testing: This is a typical UI/UX testing tactic that focuses on fundamental questions and testing scenarios and how well a chatbot can provide solutions. Chatbot technology can be a big help in improving UX on your site, but only if implemented effectively.
Automated Testing: This happens between two chatbots, and it’s an interesting way to run and produce new transcripts consistently. However, it is still essential to evaluate your bots’ replies and find ways to make them more precise and natural.
Error Handling Test: This is a test for checking how well your chatbot can handle unexpected queries. Suppose the chatbot fails to produce the desired result. In that case, your developers and copywriters need to come up with emergency answer scripts for the chatbot to deal with unexpected scenarios.
Conclusion
When used the right way, chatbots can improve the relationship between your brand and your customers. A fast and seamless customer experience lies at the core of every successful business, and a chatbot can provide exactly that.
Chatbots offer 24/7 customer support that reduces an organization’s marketing and operational costs. They also free up time for employees to focus on other value-added tasks. By optimizing your chatbot with these techniques, you can serve your customers better.
