If you are reading this, then you have probably already heard: bots are the future of marketing.
Well, even before we start, let us point to your mistake – bots are not the future, they are already the present. So, the question you might be asking is wrong. It should not be whether you need bots for your business, but how you can make bots work for you optimally.
But wait a second…
If bots are good, then why would you need to be careful about how you use them?
The reason is simple: when it comes to bots you can either use them to be helpful… or annoying.
The problem is that most of the time when marketers believe they are helpful, they actually spam their customers.
In a world where the greatest battles are led on the field of attention, most people believe that the best way to get people’s attention is if you are constantly there.
Being constantly there will not help you in any way. On the contrary, it can only repel your customers. That is to say unless you being there also provides some sort of value.
That’s where chat bots come into play.
They allow you to be there just when the customer needs you the most, hence providing ultimate support and immeasurable value that can improve your brand image and strengthen the relationship with your clients.
Bots are quite simple to understand: they are computer programs that automate a specific set of tasks. So, chatbots are programs that automate messaging – they respond to received messages and inquiries.
There are different types of chatbots depending on their level of advancement.
Some of them are programmed to send the same message to each inquiry, others can respond differently depending on a certain trigger keyword, and finally there are chatbots that use artificial intelligence and machine learning to adapt the way the communicate according to the situation.
Chatbots have been around for some time, but only in the last couple of years they have been widely adopted across different industries. Consequently, a number of surveys have taken chatbots as their subject of interest, resulting in a number of statistical findings, which only prove that the value chatbots can potentially create for businesses is no myth.
Let’s go over a few of them, for illustrator purposes:
When you think about it – these results come as no surprise. The possibility for a customer to get in touch with a business, knowing that he or she will get an instant answer shows dependability and builds trust, which consecutively leads to a stronger relationship.
Customers use the convenience chatbots offer for various reasons, out of which resolving a problem, getting an answer to a question or finding a human customer service agent that can attend to their queries are the most common ones.
But do not get this point wrong, chatbots do not create value for customers only – they are also great for your business, since they allow you to automate tasks and decrease the need for human interaction to your customers to its bare minimum. This allows companies to improve their overall results by achieving improvements in a couple of areas:
In a reality where automated conversations would not exist, companies would have to employ a person to take care of all of their customers’ queries, no matter how simple they are. This would take up a lot of time, and cost the company a lot of money, all for just answering simple questions that do not directly help the business generate more sales.
And yet, these simple queries make up a large portion of the customer satisfaction levels so they should be handled with care.
Chatbots provide the perfect solution offering the best to both sides: customers have their questions answered instantly, and companies can reallocate their time and money to more important aspects of the business.
Many times, a user will land on your page without a specific purpose in mind. Maybe they heard your name somewhere and they want to see what your company is all about.
That’s why, usually, in the beginning of each interaction with a customer, chatbots require an answer to a couple of simple questions that allows them to provide effective and useful information and guide the users to get what they need.
For example, usually, the question regarding what’s the reason you have visited the particular page is one question that you can find in most chatbot powered conversations.
Gathering this data, apart from enabling the chatbot to react the right way to the particular situation and satisfy the needs of the user, empowers you to passively do customer research and have the repeating parts of the interaction automated, leaving you with qualified leads directly sent over to you.
Most often, customers decide to contact businesses in cases of an emergency. However, you cannot know when emergencies happen, so if your company doesn’t offer a 24/7 support, chances are you will miss some of those emergencies.
Chatbots solve this problem for you, as bots do not have a 40 hour work week as most people do – they are active and ready to jump into action as soon as the first opportunity to help a client in need presents itself. This not only makes sure that you always respond to your clients’ needs, but that you do it fast, which decreases your average response time, and helps you meet your customers’ expectations.
We already mentioned this in the beginning, and we couldn’t stress it out more: bots are a double-edged sword – customers will either consider your messages as value-adding and helpful, or flag them as spam. In other words, if your chatbot manages to answer your customer’ questions and route them to the correct information – great, but if they fail to deliver an enjoyable and efficient experience, which customers could get by communicating with a human agent – you are in for a trouble.
That’s why, you should be extra careful when you are building your chatbot.
Do not stress, although what we just said might sound complex and scary – chatbots have been a practice for long enough, so there are tested and proven ways to make sure your bot serves its purpose.
And we have collected and organized all the information you need into
The biggest mistake you can make is not to set a clear goal for your chatbot from the very start. Think of it this way: every human conversation usually has some kind of purpose, and since bots try to mirror human interaction they need to follow the same pattern as well.
Ask yourself what aspect of your operations you would like to tend to. Do you want to improve your customer service? Or maybe your company has a new product you would like to promote?
There are many possible use cases for chatbots that you can consider and choose from, but it all depends on what you are trying to achieve.
You can utilize chatbot conversations on various platforms, and they will differ based on which network you’ll choose. Your options so far are your website, Twitter’s DMs and Facebook Messenger.
You might be wondering why we said that you need to create different conversations for each of these sites – but the answer will become obvious to you once you think more deeply about the possible scenarios.
For example, someone who visits your webpage has most likely already heard about your brand and knows a thing or two about your products, unlike someone who has landed on some of your blog posts through a search engine. Also, the demographics of social media users differ based on the network, so you’ll have to think of that too.
Get to know your audience and their behavior as much as you can so you can successfully continue the process and pass onto the next step.
The next step is to figure out what kind of content you would like to present to your customers.
Generally speaking, your bot can either be an informational bot or an utility bot.
Informational bots only provide a new way for users to consume content based on their behavior and preferences, while utility bots solve a user’s problem. The latter ones are what you should be focusing on.
As a rule of thumb, you should start with the most frequent questions you expect your audience to ask. To find out which ones are the things your clients inquire about most frequently, talk to the teams that are in continuous communication with them, such as marketing, customer service and sales.
Once you find the questions, it is time you give the answers.
But before that, you need to get creative and
By now, you must be wondering what makes the information bots serve different from an email newsletter.
Unlike email newsletters, with bots users can enjoy a two-way communication. But that is not the main distinction. The main distinction is the timing. While email newsletters are sent out when companies decide, bots react when the user needs their assistance.
Having said that, the biggest problem in building a bot is not in its technicalities – it is in its personality.
Yup, that’s right, if you have something that mirrors a human, then you want to make it seem as human as possible. And to do that, you do not only need to populate it with answers to every possible question a user might ask, but also craft the way the bot delivers these answers.
There are three important things to keep in mind when you are creating your bot:
People express themselves differently, so make sure you give your bot a voice, and add some visual components such as emojis or GIFs in your messages.
Consistency is the key to humanization. Even if you change copywriters, make sure that each following message reflects the personality of your bot.
You can either state it plainly, or do what many other companies do to achieve this: give your bot a name.
The last step in building your bot is figuring out how the customer journey would look like.
Your messaging should start out with a compelling message in which your customers will become aware that they are chatting with a bot and will be able to answer a couple of questions that will allow the bot to understand what they are looking for and how it can personalize the answers.
After asking the first round of questions, each customer will go on an individual customer journey. This means that you need to think of all the possible scenarios and build conversation trees for each option. The easiest way to do this is to give the customers options they can choose from as answers, so you eliminate the possible misunderstandings.
After all answers have been given and your customer has all the needed information, end the conversation with a call to action which will guide the users to a specific destination, be it checking your product page, signing up for your newsletter, or sharing some kind of content with their friends.
Note that not all conversations you create will be of the same length. Some inquiries will ask for only a couple of exchanged lines, while others may go on for a while. The key is to keep it as short as possible, while at the same time being as informative as you can, striving to make things clear and understandable.
Congrats on making it to the part where all of the other points come together. In the previous parts we covered the most important things to take into consideration when building your bot and creating your conversations. What we didn’t tell you yet is how you can go about building it – a hole we’re just about to fill.
As bots have been quite popular with companies, now you can build them yourself by using bot building platforms that require no previous programming experience. We have used ManyChat to build our chatbot, but you can choose from a long list of tools: Surveybot, Chatfuel, Botsify, ItsAlive… are just a couple of your options.
The best thing about all of these platforms is that most of them are free!
So, just like we said in the beginning – if you are wondering whether you should build your chatbot, you are asking the wrong question.
And, since you have all the information you need on how to optimize your chatbots so they help your business, there’s nothing holding you back from setting off on a fruitful chatbot building journey!
Happy chatting and may the bot be with you!
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