In recent years, chances are you’ve interacted with a chatbot or two. A chat bot, when used properly, can be a great asset to your website and the overall user experience. These two pieces are crucial and can make or break and potential lead or better yet, a sale! (You can check out our previous blog post on how you can use chat bots to take your user through the sales process!)
A ‘good’ chatbot should be able to act as an extension of your customer support efforts so that a visitor can easily learn more about your business and help them find answers to their questions efficiently. With that being said, a ‘bad’ chatbot can frustrate your visitors and become a nuisance for someone trying to navigate through your website.
To help you find the sweet spot with your chatbot, here are some of the lessons we have learned in our experience.
1. Avoid Setting & Forgetting
The most appealing aspect of a chat bot can also be its flaw. In theory, having a machine responding to visitor questions or capturing their information while you can’t sounds great! You’re able to seemingly be in two places at once, online and offline, as your chatbot handles online questions, and you focus on the offline aspects of your business.
You may assume that you just tell the bot what you want it to say and step back and watch the leads pour in. In reality, that’s not the case. Everyone engages with digital tools in unique ways, from how they phrase questions to their motivation for interacting with the bot.
You’ve probably experienced a chatbot firsthand that seemed to misunderstand you or your inquiry. So many bots fail at even the most basic tasks, bleating out “I don’t understand” when a user answers “yes” or “no” to what seems like a basic yes-or-no question. Find these moments in your chatbot’s interactions, and suggest pages or posts that are most relevant to an inquiry before a user resorts to the contact page or finding the information themselves.
You can do so by monitoring your chat bot conversations. It’s a great way to extract useful information from your audience, and see where the conversation falls flat. You can use this information to tweak your chat bot to better serve your website traffic. What are some of the patterns you notice in your chat bot conversations? Is there anything you can improve on? Are there a lot of the same questions that you haven’t tailored your chat bot to answer?
Develop your chatbot’s responses so that it can provide educational and appropriate content to your visitors when they need it.
2. Setting Up Appropriate Triggers
Don’t you find it annoying when you walk into a store and one of the sales reps intently follows you around while you’re just browsing? The same goes for your chat bot. Your visitor will be prompted by a chat feature with a simple icon tucked away, most likely in the bottom corner of your page. If your chat bot is triggered with every scroll, click or action your visitor takes, they might become frustrated and click away. Make sure your chat bot isn’t THAT kind of sales rep. Don’t overdo the automation aspect and showcase an exit option.
3. Provide Answers For a More Efficient Conversation
By providing your visitor with answer options, it avoids the mistake of having your bot “fail” or succumb to a language malfunction. It is difficult to anticipate the exact questions a user may have so help them out instead! If you offer some suggestions, your bot and the user can get to the bottom of what they are looking for faster!
4. Give Your Chatbot Some Personality
This is simple, but it is often overlooked. Don’t be afraid to make your bot pleasant to talk to! After all, they are intended to mimic human behaviour. There is a certain anonymity that comes with a chat bot and if your bot manages to keep your visitor interested, you can increase your chances of converting your lead!
5. Chatbots Are Not All The Same
Setting expectations is an important part of success. Therefore, our last piece of advice is to consider what you need the chat bot for. Will it assist customer support? Generate leads? Don’t just fall into the hype of having a chat bot for the sake of having one.
Do your research: there are many different bots with different features on the market. The right one for you depends on what kind of business you are in and how people have typically reached out to you in the past. Here is a simple guide on the 3 different types of chat bots and how they work!
We are currently using Drift, a conversational marketing chat bot. Drift gives us the flexibility to leverage automation while still having direct access to the conversations in real time.
If you have any questions about using chat bots or other sales and marketing tips, contact us!
