Since 2017, the year of the chatbots, the popularity of chatbots has been rising at a tremendous pace. From their 24/7 customer support that leads to optimum satisfaction, data collection, and analysis, their advantages are many.
According to Chatbots Magazine, chatbots can help businesses cut down almost 30 percent of their operational costs. Naturally, implementing an effective Chatbot Strategy is a key aspect for a company to achieve its long-term goals.
The article serves as a comprehensive guide for those wondering how to make a chatbot in order to reap its multiple benefits.
Identify business goals and the purpose of the bot
A practical Chatbot Strategy begins with the question ‘why’. You need to figure out the objectives that you want your company to accomplish. It will help you find out the functionalities of your bot to cater to your audience. Remember that an effective chatbot project goal statement reflects not just business goals but also customer requirements.
The conversational nature of the bot makes it essential for its responses to be short and clear. Determining the use cases of your bot will help you to design a bot that can manage all the specific as well as redundant tasks effectively than your employees.
Identifying Your Audience and Choosing Suitable Channel
Identifying your particular audience and their needs will help you to develop an efficient Chatbot Strategy. It will optimize your bot’s capability to engage with your user-base. Customer insights are key to understanding how many audience segments you can target with your bot.
Another key element is the choice of the channel for chatbot deployment. An ideal channel is one that provides an open API for the bots to be embedded programmatically. A new communication channel makes it easy for you to launch your chatbot. Depending upon your customer’s choice of platform, you may need to scale your bot for multiple platforms.
Building up Your Chatbot’s Conversation
Building and framing your chatbot’s conversation is a crucial part of your chatbot project. Chatbots are built on conversational architecture, which allows users to ask any number of questions they desire.
Here, it is important to keep in mind that apart from being fed with the regular FAQs, your bot is also capable of answering those questions whose answers the FAQs may not include.
Another aspect of designing the conversation flow is to keep the whole bot experience for the user more human-like. For this, you can use a technique called random prompting that allows variants of a particular answer on the basis of questions asked. It makes engagement with the bot more natural and human-like.
Prioritize User Stories
Prioritizing user stories enables you to analyze the user's perspective and point of view. The format of a user story goes like this:
As a , I want , so that
The framework of the conversation will go like this:
As an old customer, I want the pizza boy to remember which toppings I like, so that I receive appropriate recommendations every single time.
You need to find out about important user-stories and analyze them in detail. A Chatbot Development Company can help you greatly in this process.
Develop the Bot’s Personality and Tone of Voice
Keep in mind that chatbots are primarily conversational interfaces rather than visual. An effective Chatbot Strategy entails aligning your bot’s conversational tone with that of your brand.
The character of the bot should be developed by visualizing your bot as an employee answering user queries. The bot can be a bit amusing, or serious depending upon the situation. In other words, the unique charm of the bot with room for its personality development is the key aspect to remember while developing a script for your chatbot.
Narrowing Down on a Development Approach
There are two approaches to a chatbot’s major tasks, i.e. to comprehend the user query and obtain data from it. These approaches are: to employ a top-down rule development and using ML algorithms to learn from the accumulated data.
If you already have a large amount of customer inquiry data with the chatbot responses, you can go ahead with using the ML algorithms in your chatbot project. They will help you to discern the common answers to commonly asked questions.
In the absence of an existing corpus of data, you can use a top-down rule development approach. Start out by searching for specific keywords in the queries and working on them to create suitable rules. However, successful implementation of this approach requires a platform that has embedded linguistic tools that can effectively comprehend relationships between different words.
Test and Deploy
It is finally the time to develop a classifier that will be able to provide users with the right response. It is imperative to provide your machine learning platform with as many sentences as possible to enhance its capability to answer the diverse framing of the same question. Next, test your bot’s flow until you're satisfied with its accuracy.
After deployment, keep monitoring the bot’s interaction. It will give you various insights as to how the bot needs to be continuously adjusted to cover every type of user request.
Conclusion
An effective Chatbot Strategy consisting of the above-mentioned steps will help you unlock new opportunities for your business. Remember to apply the lessons learned from the bot development to your future projects.