Tips for Introducing a Chatbot
Adding a chatbot to your business website is straightforward, but getting the experience right takes a bit of thought. These tips will help you start your bot off on the right foot with your customers.
Work out what you want it to do
Choose one or two essential tasks for your chatbot and stick to them – to start with. Don’t aim for multi-tasking just yet, it’s better that your bot is great at one or two functions than so-so (or worse) at five or six. You want customers to appreciate it, not struggle with it.
Use an easily-remembered, unique name
Think long and hard about this. There are lots of chatbots around and so you don’t want yours to get lost in the crowd; make the name relevant to your business, but not too difficult to spell that customers can’t search for it.
Have your bot approach customers
Many customers won’t reach out to the bot, it’ll have to give them a shout. As long as the interaction goes and ends well, you’ve got a success. You need to:
- craft a great greeting message;
- use a well-positioned start button;
- tell customers how the bot can help them, and
- use the same buttons on your social media pages and website.
Make sure the talk flows naturally
By using natural conversation, your customers are more likely to trust your chatbot and to volunteer more information. Your bot should encourage conversation to find out your customers’ locations, hobbies and most frequent purchases.
Keep things simple
You already know that your bot should start off with just one or two functions, but you also need to keep communications simple and short (but friendly), free of jargon and always on-brand. Your bot is learning, alongside your customers, so don’t rush things; over time you’ll see where the sticking points are and be able to work on them.
Review your bot frequently
AI-powered chatbots have moved well past novelty status and are now a standard customer service tool, with new features and language models arriving regularly. Review your bot’s conversations often so it keeps pace with what your audience actually asks for.
Update one feature at a time
If you renew or change more than one feature or function at once, this may put off customers as it’ll feel like too much to take on board. Slow and steady wins this race.
