Author:Itai Bercovier

Great bot conversations

Seven actionable ideas, to take the demand off agents and help keep customers chatting to bots.

  1. Tell your customers what your bot can and can’t do
    • Manage customer expectations to avoid frustration and calls.  
    • Frame what the bot can help with, so customers know they can get help.  
    • Take turns: End the greeting with a question to let the customer know it’s their turn.  
  1. Keep it chatty 
    • Can you read the message in one breath (is it less than 30 words)? 
    • If it’s longer, go back and trim it down.   
    • Long messages are high effort and hard for customers to understand.  
  1. Don’t send them packing
    • There’s no need to send customers to other channels, or online FAQs.  
    • Build forms and data collection in the bot – making it easy for them to stay. 
  1. Make the bot (not the customer) do the work
    • Test query resolution from start to finish.  
    • Check turn-taking. 
    • Providing links to FAQs means customers are doing the work. Would an upfront sign-post to common questions from your homepage be better for customers? 
  1. Keep it simple
    • To many options and routes will confuse and overwhelm.  
    • Start with 3-5 simple, transactional tasks.  
  1. Don’t fence them in
    • Test for dead ends and loops.  
    • Can customers go back a step if they can’t find what they’re looking for, or if they make a mistake. If not they are likely to abandon the bot.  
  1. We all make mistakes
    • Make sure your bot can accept typos and incorrect spellings, e.g. cancel could be written as cancl, cancel, ccancel, canccel or cancell etc. 

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