The modern consumer is always on and connected. They expect an experience that’s tailored to their needs, at any time and in any channel. For the typical business, this means investing in a chatbot as a virtual agent that can meet the customer where they are and answer questions with speed and ease.
However, creating a chatbot that users will love can be a challenge. You need to consider user onboarding, interaction design, and much more — all while keeping your brand’s identity in mind. Thankfully, there are many great examples of chatbots out there to help you get started.
In this blog post, we’ll walk you through the best practices for designing a chatbot, and provide 10 helpful insider tips so you can get started right away!
Best practices when designing a chatbot
Before you even think about sketching out your chatbot design, you need to make sure that you have a clear strategy in place. You need to understand your audience, the problem you’re solving, and what makes your solution unique. Designing a great chatbot is all about knowing your users and key messaging points — do this and you can effectively guide them through your bot and get the desired outcome.
Keep in mind that chatbots today are expected to not only answer questions but also complete tasks such as booking flights, ordering pizzas, or scheduling meetings. Many cross-industry staples are cursory additions (being default selections in chatbot platforms like crisp), but there will likely be unique elements to your business that demand additional work. You need to consider how your chatbot will guide a user through these interactions and make sure that your user experience (UX) strategy is aligned. Thinking through these key messaging points will help you design an effective chatbot.
Know your audiences and key messaging points
Not only do you need to know who your audiences are, but you also need to understand their wants, needs, and pain points. What do they want to accomplish? Why do they want to accomplish it? What barriers and obstacles are in the way of them accomplishing it? And ultimately, how can your chatbot help to alleviate those pain points? Thinking through these key messaging points will help you design an effective chatbot.
Gathering this insight is a vital part of the chatbot design process: only by doing this can you build your chatbot in such a way that it serves the needs of your primary customers. You can source this valuable information in a number of ways:
- Conduct a survey: It’s the most direct form of research, but conducting a survey of your existing customer base will help you uncover your users’ most pressing needs and concerns.
- Use analytics tools: Web analytics tools such as Google Analytics can provide a wealth of information about how customers interact with your site. For instance, a page with a high exit rate might indicate an issue that a chatbot could assist with. If you’re willing to invest further, heatmap tools like Hotjar can add great context.
- Review search data: One of the most valuable pieces of information at your disposal is search data. Analyzing what your customers are searching for may uncover some key insight about their needs and pain points.
- Analyze feedback: Customer feedback is a valuable tool for any business. Review the feedback you’re receiving and try to pick out any recurring themes or frequently mentioned frustrations
Define your user experience strategy
When it comes to designing your chatbot, you need to start with your user experience strategy. What problem are you trying to solve? And how does your chatbot address that? In order to get started, it’s helpful to break down your chatbot experience into three main steps:
- Onboarding: How do you get your users started with your chatbot? It’s important to get this right since it can make or break user experience. If your onboarding is too complicated, you’ll lose users; but if it’s too simple, you’ll lose out on the opportunity to convert them into customers.
- Pathway: How does your chatbot lead your users down a pathway? This depends on the types of interactions your chatbot will support. If your chatbot is designed to help customers book a flight, you’ll want to help them select their destination, dates, and number of passengers.
- Ending: How do you end the conversation? This is where you want to be sure to include a call to action that entices users to follow up with your business.
Think about animation and voice UX
When you’re designing your chatbot, you need to think about both the visual and the verbal experiences. As such, you need to consider how your chatbot will look and feel when a user interacts with it, as well as how your bot sounds when it speaks (if your chatbot is capable of speech, of course). For the visual experience, you’ll want to consider the following:
- Visual hierarchy: What are the key elements in your design, and how are they prioritized? This helps keep your design consistent, organized, and easy for your users to navigate.
- Visual style: What is the overall look and feel of your chatbot? Is it bold and bright? Or minimal and modern? This can be reflected in everything from the color palette to the font used.
- Positioning: Where will your chatbot appear? If it appears on your website’s homepage, will it subtly stay in the bottom-right corner of the page, or pop up in the center to grab the attention of visitors?
Understand its limitations
As advanced as chatbots are increasingly becoming, they can’t yet do everything: you need to understand the capabilities of conversational AI and accept that there are some limitations to the service they can provide. While they’re perfectly capable of providing useful responses to a number of queries, they’re often unable to respond in a meaningful way to the more complex needs of certain consumers (as these classic chatbot fails make abundantly clear).
You can’t expect your chatbot to be able to provide a strong answer to every possible query, and programming it to attempt to achieve such all-purpose capability will inevitably degrade its performance and leave many of your users more frustrated (and even more confused) than when they started out! When a chatbot receives a question it can’t understand, it’ll often respond with something nonsensical, which isn’t helpful for your customer or your business — so temper your expectations and don’t expect too much from your virtual assistant.
10 insider tips for designing a chatbot
Now that we’ve covered off the most fundamental elements of designing a chatbot for your website or application, we can delve a little further into the best way to incorporate a chatbot into your business.
Here are 10 insider tips to help you create the perfect chatbot:
- Keep it simple: Rule one of designing a chatbot is to keep things simple. Overcomplicating something for the sake of it is a bad idea. Particularly if you’re creating your first chatbot, start simple and await an opportunity to increase the complexity later. That will make the design process more straightforward and leave the transition easier for your users.
- Define its ‘personality’: The way in which a chatbot interacts with your users should be in keeping with the personality and ‘tone of voice’ of your brand. Give it a name for starters, and then think about its communication style; do you want casual and conversational, clear-cut and concise, or something a little more formal?
- Be honest: Don’t try to hoodwink your users into thinking they aren’t interacting with a chatbot. Most users are pretty savvy, so be transparent with them and tell them they’re talking to a chatbot from the get-go. If they don’t want to converse with a chatbot, they won’t — but don’t try to pull the wool over their eyes.
- Focus on the first impression: In business, as in any walk of life, first impressions are everything. Don’t put your users off straight away by making your chatbot overly pushy or intrusive; think carefully about that first interaction so your chatbot comes across as a helpful tool rather than an annoyance.
- A/B test: A great way of continually improving your user experience is by A/B testing your chatbot. Serve a portion of your users one experience, and the rest another, and then review which approach had the most effective impact.
- Offer a ‘human’ alternative: This is important for two reasons. Firstly, chatbots can’t do everything, so sometimes a human touch is needed for more complex queries. Secondly, not every user wants to converse with a chatbot, and many would prefer to speak to a human instead!
- Keep teaching: If you’re using a rule-based chatbot (where its responses are based on pre-set parameters), help your chatbot develop by teaching it new things. Review transcripts of your customers’ interactions, identify any areas for improvement, and update your rules to help your chatbot serve your users more effectively.
- Train your users, not just your chatbot: Not everyone is used to interacting with a chatbot, so guide your users on how to get the most from their interactions. Not understanding how a chatbot works is likely to leave a user frustrated or confused, but your chatbot can help them with messages like: “I’m a chatbot. Short and concise statements make it easier for me to understand your query.”.
- Analyze, analyze, analyze: You can’t just assume that your chatbot is working well without crunching the numbers. Is it increasing customer engagement? Reducing bounce rates? Boosting conversions? You need to know if your chatbot is having the desired impact (if not, you’ll need to tweak your approach).
- Know when it’s not working: Chatbots aren’t for everyone. They don’t work for every business, and you may need to accept that your chatbot is adding little value for your customers. It may require a rethink of your strategy, or you might surmise that a chatbot is simply not right for your organization.
Summing up
Chatbots are more than just a trend — they’re here to stay. In fact, it’s estimated that 80% of businesses plan to invest in conversational customer engagement to boost their user experiences. That’s why it’s so important to consider how to design a chatbot from the ground up. If you want your chatbot to be successful, you need to start by mapping out your user experience strategy.
Once you understand who your users are and what your key messaging points are, you can decide what problem you’re trying to solve and how your chatbot addresses that. It’s also crucial to think about the visual design, in addition to carefully and consistently managing expectations around what a chatbot can and can’t do.
Follow these best practices and insider tips and you’ll be well on your way to designing an engaging, user-friendly chatbot that elevates your user experience, boosts engagement, and results in better lead generation and conversion.