48% of global consumers accepted that they would rather connect with a company over chat than any other source of contact. 35% of the users would like to see more companies incorporating chatbots. As for the business side of the story, chatbots save around £6 billion per year and a simple chat option in the mobile app brings up the revenue by over 30%.
These are only a snippet of thousands of statistics that are all around the internet and lying on a million office reports hinting towards how chatbot app development has turned out to be the best business decision.
Done right, chatbots can single-handedly make your company approachable and open to business even when you sleep. Done wrong, it leaves users unsatisfied and complaining about how your brand is slow in the logic department.
What helps in making a chatbot effective, besides of course passing all your chatbot success worries to a chatbot app development company, is having a right strategy in place.
1. Have a Purpose
Knowing what purpose your chatbot would solve is the first step in designing a working, revenue-generating chatbot design strategy in 2018.
The last thing that you would want is to join the chatbot world just because every business is on it. While it is true that it benefits a range of different industries, it is also true that not all businesses need it, especially the ones that are working only around a particular geographical location i.e. in the same time zone.
But if yours is a business that would benefit immensely with Chatbots, think of the process that you would like to give your bot the autonomy of. The scale of the process that you are looking forward to leaving in the hands of chatbot will help decide which bot type you have to invest in (more on this later).
2. Conversation Flow
The flow in which your chatbot would converse is one of the most important things for your chatbot design guide to cover.
The ideal situation when it comes to deciding how the conversation should flow is that the bot should start with a general salutation followed by asking questions and then pitching the product when the user put in the respective action words like ‘Tell me More’ or ‘Give more information’.
The biggest mistake that businesses make is pitching in the product as soon as the user becomes active on the website or page when they should go with a more human-like conversation flow.
3. Bot Personality
The only way to make your bot more human-like is to give it a personality. Now when I say personality, I am not implying you to create an avatar and anime man. No, when I say personality, I mean giving it a tone, a difference in the US and UK English, slang, and age-appropriate responses.
Now, in the normal scenario, a business doesn’t have a specific exact type of customer base, so would you keep making bots aiming for each of them to meet specific criteria? The answer is obviously No. What you can do is ask your users’ background and change the initial conversation level of the bot.
4. Give Context From the Beginning
Make the purpose of your chatbot clear from the first two messages itself. Aim for a scenario where your user knows exactly what the bot would be helping them with and have no misinterpreted expectations and then a bad customer service instance.
The first two dialogue to and fro should be enough for your user to know what is to be expected from the chatbot. If you miss this step, the chances are that your bot dashboard will get filled with repeated questions and frustrations of not getting answers.
5. Share before Publicizing
So you have developed an amazing bot that converses with masses effortlessly, specializes in giving the users the exact information that they need, which even varies from context to context. What’s next?
And the answer does not make it live on your website or integrate into your mobile app right away. The answer is to first share it with your in-house teams to see if it’s actually able to answer different questions and different contexts.
By sharing it with the team and taking their feedback, you will be able to track exactly how people are reacting to it and what changes would make the conversation more meaningful.
6. Choose your Words Wisely
The most important element of strategic chatbot development according to chatbot design trend 2018 is choosing the words right. Your copywriting technique should be on point to not just entice the users to start the conversation but keep them hooked enough to convert into your site’s loyal customer or subscriber.
Know that your chatbot copy has the power to make your chatbot a conversion magnet and it should be treated just like that – as a mix of emotions and conversion statements.
So, here were the pointers that would help you draft a killer, high revenue generating chatbot design strategy in 2018. The one that would result in a chatbot that people love to converse with and pay to.
[Know how to judge if chatbots are working for your business]
Now that you know what an ideal chatbot should operate like, it is time to look into the three types of chatbots that you should invest in developing once you have your chatbot design guide planned.
The Three Types of Chatbots
1. Menu Based Chatbots
These are one of the most common types of chatbot available in the market today. Using this chatbot, brands give multiple options to the users to select from. These are used mainly when the users are looking for a direct answer.
One of the biggest challenges that businesses face when it comes to menu based chatbots is that the process that users will have to follow to come to the point when they get the desired answer is quite long. They have to click through several buttons and options to come on one point.
2. Keyword Recognition Based Chatbots
These bots utilize the blend of AI and keywords to determine the appropriate response. They lack in performance when they are asked a lot of similar questions with similar sounding keywords, even when the context is different.
A new set of bots are now present in the market that is hybrid. They automatically switch to the menu based type when they are unable to answer users’ queries through AI.
3. Contextual Chatbots
The most advanced of the chatbot family, these bots remember the interaction and its outcome and keeps growing on it to give better result to the users over time. They work strictly on Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence to help users come to a decision.
As they are based on ML and AI technologies, they come with a self-learning ability, which helps in not just customer relationship management but also a positive sales conversion rate.
The ultimate decision of which chatbot type to invest in depends entirely on your business need. If yours is a simple Q&A type app where you aim at giving a quick in and out experience to your users, answering their questions to the point, menu-based chatbot app development is what you should go for. But, in case you have an assistant like mobile app idea, then you will lose your pockets a little and invest in Contextual chatbot development.