Essential Tips To Improve Your Chatbot

Guest post Samantha Kaylee.

Chatbots are only effective for specific industries, they cannot personalize responses, and they are just a FAQ page on the site. 

Including the above three, there are many more chatbot myths that persist in the business world. Are these myths stopping you from handling customer communication more efficiently?

AI-enabled chatbots have unmatchable competencies that can offer a competitive edge to your business. Plus, you can save crucial time handling customer queries, and utilize it on a core business activity. 

 

A glimpse of the chatbot industry 

As per the latest statistics on chatbots, the chatbot market is predicted to grow by 30% in the next five years and has become a $1.23 billion industry. The chatbot ecosystem is incredibly diverse in terms of personalities, design, and functionality. 

The key factors responsible for market growth are 24/7 business operability, low operational cost, and high customer satisfaction. 

Also interesting: The 10 Most Important Benefits Of Chatbots For Companies And Users

In fact, chatbots are the handyman for all types of business needs. 

Now that you’ve understood why Conversational AI is crucial for your business, it is essential to improve your chatbot. We have summarized the most important tips to improve your chatbot and customer experience. 

 

Follow these genius tips to improve your chatbot

Here are some expert chatbot tips that you can follow to provide human-like chatting experiences to your users. 

1. Work on your chatbot conversation strategy 

Building a promising chatbot conversation strategy is the first step towards success. Here are a few important steps that every chatbot strategist should follow to create a smooth conversational flow.

Wait, what is a conversational flow?

To put it simply, it is a decision tree that offers a detailed overview of events, decisions, and outcomes. When you design this flowchart, you are basically creating the possible decisions your bot will perform upon receiving a request. 

Here’s how it might look like:

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Let’s get started with the main techniques to improve your chatbot’s conversation strategy. 

a. Setting up the ground rules

Bot or not – should chatbots reveal their identity?

As per a study, almost 75% of customers say that they want to know if they are chatting with a human or a bot, while 48% said it felt creepy when a bot tries to be human. Plus, transparency is ranked as a top priority by modern customers. 

A good practice is to let your visitors know if they are talking to a chatbot. Look at the following example. 

Dolomit Superski Chatbot

 

Some other principles to start with:

• Try not to force getting the details of your users before the chat begins. 
• Don’t ask for information persistently.
• After gaining the necessary details, try to move forward.

b. Presenting the solution to the customer

Bots are the customer’s need of the hour. So make it more convenient by presenting the solutions and the things that the bot can perform as quickly as possible. 

Facebook and Twitter are popular for quick replies. Look at how the Messenger bot of Lidl UK put its functionality into action:

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c. Adding a human touch

How to add a human touch to a chatbot conversation is a million-dollar question for most strategists. Giving a human name to a chatbot isn’t enough. You’ll lose a customer if your bot fails to maintain the conversational back-and-forth. 

Your chatbot needs natural language processing (NLP) as it helps to understand the intent of the customers, which scripted chatbots cannot. They can use words and phrases that humans use in their routine conversations. 

Also interesting: Artificial Intelligence vs. Machine Learning vs. NLP

Check how the travel bot Hipmunk responded to a customer looking for flight information. 

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d. Gathering feedback and maintaining a database

A study showed that 52% of customers agree to provide feedback after finishing a conversation with a bot. 

In order to improve your chatbot, you must know how your users feel about the chatbot and what you can do to make it better. There are multiple ways to collect customer feedback after resolving a customer’s issue. Here’s an example of doing this. 

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By the way, all Onlim chatbots include an option to rate the chatbot and ask users for feedback. 

 

2. Improving customer satisfaction

One of the main purposes of adding chatbots to your digital communication is to improve customer satisfaction. Read on to learn how you can improve it with these chatbot tips. 

a) Feeding your bot with updated information 

If you set up your chatbot and then just forget about it, it will become outdated very fast, in the same way, a website’s content that has not been updated. 

Feeding your chatbot regularly with real customer data is a way to keep it up to date. When you add new content to your chatbot, its ability to respond to novel queries enhances, and it works with more efficiency. 

But it is also essential to review user experiences and alter responses that don’t work to improve your chatbot. Some common symptoms indicating that your bot needs to be updated:

• Your bot is not answering common queries.
• Bad responses.
• Not identifying when to shift the query to a human agent.
• No connection with available resources.  
• You get bad user feedback.

b) Providing an escalation path

Undoubtedly, bots add value to brand-customer routine communication. But you have to understand that a bot cannot replace humans, especially if a question gets too complex. 

This is where businesses should have the option to hand over the conversation to a live human agent. At Onlim all chatbots are equipped with such a feature, which is called a “human switch”.

c) Making them more empathetic 

Bots can convey empathy in interactions. If your service bot lacks empathy, this is going to be a big problem for you. 

While empathy, warmth, and trust are terms not associated with machines, early adopters of chatbot technology have already realized that a shift in bot and user engagement is about to come. 

Customers often struggle to share their emotions with a bot because most of them lack empathy. On the flip side, people feel good when bots seem to understand how a person feels in a given situation. 

The good news is that emotional bots can empathize with users and deliver them a great experience, so they keep coming back. 

Check out the example of this bot made to help people with stress. 

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In this case, the bot expresses empathy with words. Another way to improve your chatbot and make it more empathetic is to include emojis in the conversation. 

 

3. Make your chatbots market for you

By answering queries, chatbots can do a whole lot of things for you, and one of them is promoting your brand. Here’s how you improve your chatbot for increased brand visibility. 

a) Indicating your brand 

The design elements of your bot can do a number of things for you. They can catch the attention of your target audience and send all the relevant information about your brand and its products/ services. At Onlim many elements of your chatbot are customisable to your brand, e.g. the bot avatar and chat image, colour and font of the chat box and messages, button elements and more.

Onlim Blog Bot

 

b) Conducting market research

Without a doubt, chatbots are the future of market research. They can reduce the cost of research, handle more customers at a time, and establish trust. 

Most customers abandon general surveys because they are too boring. Chatbots, however, are way more conversational. This means your service bot can acquire a great deal of information without bothering your customers too much. 

As customers begin to interact with your bot, the bot starts to process the information. 

c) Assisting and managing visitors

Assisting visitors in the right way can help you transform them into clients. But generating leads and nurturing them is time-consuming and quite expensive. Chatbots help you with this process

AI-enabled chatbots can send automated messages and personalized responses to customers.

Also interesting: How Will eCommerce Benefit from Chatbots?

d) Moving customers through your funnel

AI engineered chatbots allow businesses to design a personalized sales funnel to guide potential buyers throughout the buying journey.  

With chatbots gathering and analyzing information, customer insights are quite easy. Now marketers just need to create personalized messages for the various stages in their marketing and sales funnel.

e) Sending relevant recommendations

Chatbots are a great opportunity for companies to offer suggestions based on customer’s needs. This makes interaction quite fun. 

This strategy ensures that customers get a tailored solution for their needs. Plus, it is a proven technique that builds high awareness and reliability. 

If you’d like to learn more about we use knowledge graph technology to enable better conversations for chatbots and voice assistants, download our whitepaper. 

 

4) Maintaining and optimizing your chatbot 

Your chatbot strategy is incomplete without optimization. Here are some techniques for you to further improve your chatbot

a) Adding additional topics

It is advised to start with a few frequently asked questions (FAQs)and then add more topics your chatbot can answer over time. A well-structured and informative chatbot enhances the customer’s journey and provides support along all stages.

b) Adding more access points/channels

Many companies launch their bot on one site, and then they decide to add more widgets to other channels. Platforms like Facebook Messenger and Google Assistant are also an option.

The widgets look different at different access points, such as desktop vs. mobile and you can offer text as well as voice-enabled assistants. Adding more access points simply adds convenience for users. 

Also interesting: Why Google Assistant Is Leading The Voice Assistant Race

c) Monitoring the interactions with users

You need to constantly review the interaction between your chatbot and its users. When you develop the habit to analyze user feedback, you can learn details about:

• The most popular questions.
• The least asked questions.
• Questions that are not answered/ or wrongly answered.
• Inaccurately recognized user intents.
• Further topics that need to be added to train and improve the chatbot.

d) Keeping an eye on the market

What if your rival has a nice feature that you don’t have? Even if your team is already working hard to improve your chatbot, always keep an eye on the market and your industry peers to see what they are doing and to stay competitive in the long run. 

 

In summary 

Considering the enormous potential of intelligent bots, companies are trying hard to make them better. We encourage you to use these tips to improve your chatbot and make it stand out in the crowd and use it to help you achieve a greater competitive advantage. 

 

Author bio:

Samantha Kaylee is presently working as an Assistant Editor at Crowd Writer, a trusted online platform that offers the best assignment writing service at the lowest prices. She aims to help small and medium-sized businesses with her business knowledge and expert opinions.