How to Ensure You Chatbot is Actually Useful to Your Customers

We talk about chatbots as if they were these almighty solutions that could do everything, sometimes more. In theory, that’s exactly what they are. Their immense potential is hampered only by the limits of our imagination, skills, and (most importantly) knowledge.

We say that to emphasize that most chatbots fail because of our ignorance.

Entrepreneurs big and small, a surprising number of them, assume that installing a chatbot would be the same as employing a superhuman. That once deployed, their chatbot would know exactly what to do and how to talk to customers. What a naive assumption.

If you want a helpful chatbot solution, you must teach it how to be of help.

Start by answering these key questions (and also, these):

• What do I aim to accomplish with a chatbot?
• What kind of help will this chatbot provide?
• Which customer channel will the chatbot use?

This will help you develop an informed strategy for chatbot deployment. Because chatbots truly can do everything, it will also allow you to design the solution your customers really need. Trying to do everything on a guess is the recipe for doing nothing well.

Of course, the fourth and most important question you need to ask is:

• What do my customers need from a chatbot?

According to some studies, most chatbot users need a quick answer in an emergency, a resolution to their complaint or problem, or a detailed explanation of a certain product or service. Many of them approach digital assistants to help them find a human rep.

Answering the “what customers want” question is never easy. In this case, it requires you to consult your CRM system, update customer profiles, and revisit ideal buyer personas. It also needs you to feel the market demand pulse and determine customer behavior.

Most importantly, still, you need to see which aspects of your customer service lag behind.

Alternatively, you can simply ask them what they need.

A simple survey can help you determine what kind of functionalities your customers expect from this solution, as well as whether or not they are interested in using it in the first place. If there's no real demand for a chatbot among your audience, don’t waste your time.

Whatever it does, a chatbot is responsive 24/7 and available across platforms. It never grows tired, nor does it suffer from workload-induced burnouts. This machine-like quality makes its delivery refreshingly consistent, in comparison to human reps who are prone to mistakes.

In a chatbot, you have a flawless customer service agent.

Now everything you need to do is tell it what to do. Instead of trying to cram it with different kinds of expertise - which would take months to build and months to test - pick one or two chatbot features based on what you’ve learned about your customers’ needs, and make them perfect.

For instance, you can teach it to offer answers to FAQs, so that your customers don’t have to spend hours browsing your online knowledge base. Wouldn’t that be useful? Your chatbot could also check orders and delivery status, or remind customers about their abandoned carts.

Then again, you have personalized recommendations.

Thanks to their machine learning capability, which allows them to collect customer data, analyze it, and form conclusions at every interaction, chatbots thrive at delivering custom-tailored customer experiences. If less is more, and it is, then you shouldn’t miss out on this opportunity.

Oh, and don’t make your bot any more talkative than it needs to be.

Don’t be too naive to presume that your chatbot is 100% ready for deployment.

It probably never will be.

As with any other digital product, bot testing is key to building a truly useful solution. Your newly designed assistant will most certainly be flawed and embarrassing in the beginning, but don’t worry. Letting it interact with people is the only way for it to learn and improve.

Create a focus group and look for the following problems:

• There may be an oversight in code and functions.
• The user experience may not be intuitive enough.
• You may have forgotten an important function.
• Or, you may have added one function too many.

And then, repeat the test. If this is your first chatbot, you’ll probably need to test it in-house three or four times before you finally make it available to your clients. Even then, don’t expect it to be perfect. Launch the demo version and never stop improving it.

Remember, a chatbot can only be as useful as you make it.

Technically speaking, this solution is incredibly easy to design and deploy. It’s determining what to with it and how that is difficult, which is why research and brainstorming should be the only tasks on your plate for now. Discover your chatbot’s value first and build it second.

Chatbots provide an elevated customer experience. They boost sales while cutting costs. When they are not busy delivering news and instructions, answering queries and questions, solving problems and pain points, chatbots are treating anxiety and depression.

But not all bots are made equal - despite being all-knowing, omnipresent, superfast, and fluid in most languages, some of these humanoids still fail to engage customers.

It’s hardly their fault, though. Like all smart machines, chatbots are designed, trained, and deployed by human beings. They don’t suffer from system flaws but from human errors. If your new chatbot doesn’t deliver, it is mostly because you did something wrong.

Here’s what you need to do for your chatbot to reach its full potential.