Identify existing business goals and areas to deploy AI and chatbots.
Whether it is automating simple areas of customer support or engaging visitors with a human-like assistant, you must outline and have your goals well defined. Also, ensure that your chatbot strategy aligns with your customers’ needs. It is imperative to create target personas and understand their needs and expectations before deploying chatbots.
For example, John loves shopping online and overshoots his credit limit most of the time. The chatbot creates a trend of his expenses from the past months and sends a report to John at the start of every month to make informed decisions Assign specific KPIs to measure, achieve, and modify to obtain the desired results.
Some of the most common chatbot KPIs are retention rate (percentage of users returning to use the chatbot), bot messages (total number of messages sent by the chatbot in a conversation), active users (who read messages from the chatbot but do not engage), etc. KPIs aren’t set in stone—they can be customized based on your goals and can be altered at any time. Analytics tools like Botanalytics help analyze the bot data and make the necessary changes. Catalog the required technology and talent for development and deployment.
The first two steps in this exercise will give you a fair understanding of the technology and talent required to deploy the chatbot. Are you going to buy or build? Will a simple chatbot suffice? If it’s a complex project, you may need to deploy a chatbot with natural language understanding (NLU). Based on the answers to these questions, assess if you have the required talent or if you need to hire. Build branded, conversational chatbots.
A chatbot is yet another communication touchpoint of your brand, like your website or social media. The overall look and feel of the experience should be consistent with your brand’s style. Customers expect chatbot conversations to be as smooth and natural as human interactions. Design an empathetic chatbot with a personal touch. Keep the flow conversational and avoid asking open ended questions. At any point during the conversation, if the chatbot fails to answer the user’s questions, always make it easier to contact a live agent to avoid a dead end.