Four Essential Considerations for Successful Chatbot Design

Chatbots solutions have exploded over the past couple of years. There more companies using chatbots each day and this trend only seems to be growing. One of the reasons for this is that there are many free chatbots that can be found even for small companies on a tight budget.

On the other hand, it has become easier than ever to build a chatbot for your business, as there are platforms such as SnatchBot which allow companies to design their chatbots without any coding knowledge. From a technical aspect, it’s easier than ever to develop a chatbot for your business.

Still, this doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t take it seriously and consider its operational needs. One of the essential aspects that you must consider when designing a bot is how it will respond to various questions.

A lot of companies choose to create branded chatbots which have a personality of their own. This helps engage customers further. If your chatbot has a personality, then you need to consider it when designing responses. If your bot is casual and friendly, then all of the responses should go hand in hand with this casual tone to match the bot’s personality.

For example, you can design the responses so that the bot adds funny comments to the answer it’s giving, such as “here you go boss”, “that’s what I dug up” and so on. On the other hand, if you are trying to convey professionalism through your bot, then formulate formal and straightforward responses that will show seriousness.

Depending on the type of business you are running and the purpose of your chatbot it can be designed to give various answers and choices. Bear in mind that you will most likely design flows and that you will naturally have a structure that will include various choices given to customers.

You must consider the conversation people have had with the bot so far and which steps the customers took to reach a certain point, as they have more options in front of them. Each of these options must be thoroughly reviewed and considered to make sure that you provide the most accurate paths a customer needs.

A lot of businesses can’t really personalize their chatbots by addressing their customers by their names. However, if this option does fit into your type of business, this might be a good opportunity to make customers feel special and engage them even better through your chatbot. If you plan on doing this, then bear in mind that you will have to add variables into the chatbot’s responses.

This means that you will have to design responses that will work perfectly with the variables you’ve added. Furthermore, you can personalize the whole conversation even further by adding more variables and not just for names and last names but also for location, previous purchases etc.

When writing chatbot responses you have to consider the whole potential conversation that leads to a certain question or choice. You must create responses for all paths a user can take to ultimately reach the end goal. Some users will seek more guidance, some will quickly get a grip, and there will also be those that will intentionally try to confuse your bot and make it fail.

Bear in mind that chatbots are non-linear and that your responses need to be designed for all of the potential outcomes that could happen. At the same time, the more flexible your chatbot is, the better it will be.

However, the higher the flexibility, the more responses you need to write and create. To provide great user experience, you must anticipate all potential actions and design your bot to respond adequately to all of them, while adding as much flexibility as possible.

These are the 4 essentials you absolutely must consider when designing responses for your chatbot. Luckily, the best chatbot platforms give you the power to design responses easily and test them in a similar manner. This means that you can always make the necessary tweaks and improve your chatbot until it’s ready.