Table of Contents:
1. Introduction: The Rise of Chatbots
2. Step One: Gathering Information About Your Potential Customers
3. Step Two: Deciding What the Bot is Going to Do to Meet Your Customers' Expectations
4. Step Three: Selecting a Platform and Building Your Bot
5. Step Four: Checking if the Chatbot Works and Improving It Further
6. Step Five: Launching Your Chatbot and Monitoring Its Activity
7. Pros and Cons of Chatbots
8. Conclusion
9. Resources
10. FAQ
🤖 Introduction: The Rise of Chatbots
In 2011, it was predicted that by 2020, customers would manage 85 percent of their relationships with businesses without interacting with humans. And here we are, with chatbot technology spread across hundreds of channels and picked as the number one way to automate your communications. Chatbots are the perfect way to improve all customer interactions and increase the number of potential business opportunities.
🤖 Step One: Gathering Information About Your Potential Customers
To kick things off, you should start by gathering information about your potential customers. Find out who your customers are, what they want, which words they use to get their idea across, and get familiar with the customer experience in its full capacity. Many businesses already have data on their customers from different channels. They understand and define customer intents with the help of customer journey maps. Customer journey maps start with awareness and end with the final purchase, followed by brand loyalty. Analyzing different checkpoints during this customer journey will give you insight into what served as a pain point for the customer. This information helps us understand our customers better and in turn creates helpful conversations as part of that chatbot.
🤖 Step Two: Deciding What the Bot is Going to Do to Meet Your Customers' Expectations
After you've got the customer's expectations down pat, we move on to planning and deciding how chatbot is going to satisfy the needs of our potential customers. There are six ways a chatbot can meet customer expectations:
1. Narrow scope: The key here is to not spread ourselves too thin. Answering technical questions is difficult in comparison to answering simple questions. So to ensure our bot provides correct answers and to ensure an effective conversation flow is maintained to allow users to have a positive experience, we keep the scope as narrow as possible. Will we be doing less? Sure, but it's a matter of quality over quantity, and we know we can always widen our scope or purpose in the future when we have a better understanding of customer behaviors.
2. Consistent responses: We want our chatbot to have a personality that doesn't sound fake and aligns with our brand's tone of voice. After all, the whole point of it all is to create a real-life experience for customers that feels as close to a normal human interaction as possible.
3. 24/7 availability: Customers are impatient and don't like waiting around for hours to receive a response from human-mediated customer service. Chatbots never grow tired of answering user questions straight away.
4. Identifying the intent: Chatbots should break down the customer's question and bring up appropriate responses from the database.
5. Streamline the experience: The conversation should be seamless and delight customers every step of the way.
6. Multiple languages: International clients find it easy to communicate with a bot that understands their native language.
🤖 Step Three: Selecting a Platform and Building Your Bot
Once we define our target audience and chatbot objectives to meet the customer expectations, the next logical step is to build a bot using the questions of the customer's responses, network alerts, and APIs. Which platform should you use for building and managing your chatbot? Well, if you're a HubSpot user, you're sorted. But if not, all good. There are plenty of chatbot development companies out there, but our favorite is the automation platform. Automation platform is user-friendly and brings you the best results in a matter of minutes. Other chatbot solution providers include Tars, ManyChat, Bot Society, Lanbot, and Chatfuel.
🤖 Step Four: Checking if the Chatbot Works and Improving It Further
Our bot learning should not come at the expense of real customers looking for answers. It's best to test bot metrics with staff members and select users before putting it out there for the world to see. Running it by them first will help the chatbot learn to decode new phrases and link them to pre-defined intents. It'll also discover aspects that hinder user experience, like loopholes, bugs, and new intents that we're missing. Before officially launching the chatbot, consider testing by a broad customer base for a short period of time.
🤖 Step Five: Launching Your Chatbot and Monitoring Its Activity
Now that we're through with the building, learning, and testing about chatbot, it's time to finally launch it in the market channels. You can launch your chatbot on the client website, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Slack, Telegram, to name a few. After launching the new service, we must monitor the activity of the chatbot in terms of its performance while being bombarded with hundreds and thousands of intense, demanding, quick, and valuable responses. Metrics such as average handle time and mean time to resolve just won't cut it for a multifaceted channel that juggles multiple queries simultaneously. You should be constantly monitoring the completion rate, bounce rate, and reuse rate. Monitoring these relevant metrics helps us gather more data that you can feed into the chatbot's learning process for future references.
🤖 Pros and Cons of Chatbots
Pros:
- Chatbots are available 24/7, which means customers can get help at any time.
- Chatbots can handle multiple queries simultaneously, which means customers don't have to wait in line.
- Chatbots can provide personalized recommendations based on customer data.
- Chatbots can reduce the workload of customer service representatives, which means they can focus on more complex issues.
Cons:
- Chatbots can't handle complex issues that require human intervention.
- Chatbots can't understand sarcasm or humor, which can lead to misunderstandings.
- Chatbots can't provide the same level of empathy as a human customer service representative.
- Chatbots can't handle all languages, which can be a problem for international clients.
🤖 Conclusion
Chatbots are the future of customer service. They provide a quick and efficient way to handle customer queries, which means customers can get help at any time. By following the five steps outlined in this article, you can implement an effective chatbot strategy that meets your customers' expectations. Remember to constantly monitor the chatbot's activity and improve it further to provide the best customer experience possible.
🤖 Resources
- HubSpot: https://www.hubspot.com/
- Automation platform: https://www.automation.com/
- Tars: https://hellotars.com/
- ManyChat: https://manychat.com/
- Bot Society: https://botsociety.io/
- Lanbot: https://lanbot.io/
- Chatfuel: https://chatfuel.com/
🤖 FAQ
Q: What is a chatbot?
A: A chatbot is a computer program designed to simulate conversation with human users, especially over the internet.
Q: How do chatbots work?
A: Chatbots use natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning algorithms to understand and respond to user queries.
Q: What are the benefits of using chatbots?
A: Chatbots provide a quick and efficient way to handle customer queries, which means customers can get help at any time. They can also handle multiple queries simultaneously, provide personalized recommendations based on customer data, and reduce the workload of customer service representatives.
Q: What are the limitations of chatbots?
A: Chatbots can't handle complex issues that require human intervention, can't understand sarcasm or humor, can't provide the same level of empathy as a human customer service representative, and can't handle all languages.
Q: How can I implement a chatbot strategy?
A: Follow the five steps outlined in this article: gather information about your potential customers, decide what the bot is going to do to meet your customers' expectations, select a platform and build your bot, check if the chatbot works and improve it further, and launch your chatbot and monitor its activity.
