While chatbots are a relatively new technology, they are gaining immense popularity in the digital world and among consumers as of late. With virtual assistants in more and more homes every day and with a wealth of information just a few taps away on our smartphones, we’ve grown accustomed to having instantaneous access to all the answers we’re looking for. That’s why it’s crucial for businesses to adapt. Chatbot can provide that instantaneous response users are looking for and still provide a memorable customer experience.

Even if you’re already aware of the growing presence and importance to know that your business would benefit from one, you may still be wondering how exactly it would fit into your marketing or support strategy or how to build one. Luckily, we’ve created this simple guide on creating a great customer experience using a chatbot in seven steps.

1. Identify Your Chatbot Goals

Having an ultimately successful chatbot depends on having a real issue it can solve. Don’t develop a chatbot simply because you see other sites doing it or read about them in a marketing blog. You should have realistic goals you want to meet with your chatbot.

So, what are these goals? When determining your chatbot goals, you should be thinking about the customer. Why would your customer engage with a bot? What would they be looking for? How do you anticipate they will interact with your chatbot and what steps do you want them to take afterward?

Your chatbot goals should largely reflect company goals that are short-term. What types of tasks would be best suited for a chatbot? Perhaps you want your chatbot to answer FAQs for your customers. Or maybe you want your chatbot to be proactive and focus on informing users of new services or products you offer. Whatever items you decide on, the ultimate mission is to create an easier, quicker, and more satisfying experience for your customers.

Once you’ve clearly identified the goals you want your chatbot to achieve, it’s time to start the design process.

2. Choose Custom-Made or Ready-to-Use?

There are two avenues you can take when deciding to create a chatbot. You can choose a ready-to-use bot-building platform or you can choose to custom-make your chatbot from scratch. Both have pros and cons that you should be aware of before making a decision.

Custom Chatbot: Pros and Cons

A custom bot is a great choice if you are looking for specific features and want plenty of flexibility to make adjustments along the way. Custom bots also give you the opportunity to create an in-depth conversation flow.

It’s also important to consider the cons of choosing a custom chatbot. If you don’t have the technical know-how, you’ll probably have to hire a developer to build your bot. Depending on the features you want and how complicated your bot is, the process may take more time and money to complete than you want to spend.

Ready-to-Use Chatbot: Pros and Cons

An out-of-the-box chatbot saves you from having to hire a developer or have the substantial technical know-how. There’s no coding required, the process is much faster, and the cost is much lower. If you don’t have a ton of resources at your disposal or you’re in a time crunch, a ready-to-use bot is a way to go.

On the other hand, a ready-to-use chatbot has its limitations. It’s already been built, so the types of features you can add or changes you can make will probably be severely limited. Depending on the bot building platform, you may find restrictions on which channels you can use your bot on.

3. Designing Your Chatbot

Now it’s time to decide on your chatbot design. There are several things you’ll need to consider. Do you want a text-based chatbot or a voice-based chatbot? A text-based messenger chatbot, works on one or more messaging platforms. Users will likely interact with this kind of chatbot on a screen, like their mobile device or computer. A voice-based chatbot works differently. Users interact with a voice-based chatbot by speaking to it in their natural language, usually screen-free.

Once you’ve decided which kind of chatbot you need, it’s time to design your conversation flow. There should be a balance of functionality and engagement. Here are a few things to consider:

Keep the conversation flow naturally.

Think about your customers and about the different things they might talk about with your bot. Think about how those conversations could start. For example, people usually begin a conversation with a greeting such as “hello” or “hi there”. Your bot will need to be able to recognize these phrases and respond with a “greeting message”. Also, keep in mind that your bot will more than likely receive unexpected responses, so ensure that they are accounted for when designing your conversation.

Offer quick reply options.

‘Yes’ or ‘No’ buttons or suggested topic or question buttons can create an easy and timely experience for your users. Quick reply options are also great for users that aren’t quite sure what they need or what topic their question falls into.

Don’t be afraid to give hints.

A great way to make sure your conversations stay focused is to give responses that are suggestive and not too open-ended. For example: “What type of vehicle are you interested in? Right now, we have sedans and full-size SUVs on sale.”

Make your answers vary.

One key to a successful chatbot is making sure it doesn’t sound like a, well, bot. Give your chatbot a variety of answers and change up how it begins and ends its sentences.

Make your chatbot likable.

Don’t be afraid to give your bot some personality. You don’t want to make it rude or over the top, but also don’t be afraid to throw in a few jokes here and there to keep the conversation light and the user engaged.

4. Be Available if Necessary

Chatbots are, well, bots. There are certain limitations to what they can do. Offering users the option to speak with a human if they want can be the difference between keeping them on your site and obtaining a lead and having them bounce. Not only should this be a frequently available option to users, it should also be obvious.

5. Choose the Appropriate Channels

Your chatbot doesn’t have to live exclusively on your website. In fact, chatbots can be used across multiple channels and can connect conversations. Think about where your target audience spends the most time. With a multitude of platforms available today, you can utilize their interfaces to link your bot to multiple channels, thereby reaching more of those target users.

Whichever platforms you decide on, make sure you give your chatbot a presence. Don’t let it simply hide in a corner. Get creative and look for opportunities to use your chatbot to convert.

6. Don’t Hesitate to Test Your Ideas

Even with the best designs, it’s incredibly important to test things out. This is especially important before making your chatbot live. Make sure it accurately answers questions, helps customers find solutions, is easy to use, and that there are no kinks to work out.

What you should be checking for:

1. Onboarding process

This is the first item you’ll want to check when testing your bot. Verifying the onboarding process means ensuring that your chatbot initiates engagement with a user a soon as they open the bot window.

2. Accurate, working links

Make that any link your bot provides a user works and goes to where it’s supposed to. Broken links or links that lead nowhere will hurt your user experience.

3. When your chatbot is confused

As previously mentioned, your bot will likely encounter some unusual or challenging responses from users. Make sure there’s an input in place for when your chatbot doesn’t understand a user’s response or what they want. It can be something as simple as, “I’m sorry, I’m not sure what you mean. Can you try rephrasing your question?”

7. Continue to Learn

The best companies are constantly evolving. Even once you’ve designed, tested, and resolved initial issues with your chatbot, that doesn’t mean the job is done. It’s critically important to continue to collect and analyze data regularly to determine what’s working and what’s not and to improve where you can. This will ensure that your customer experience is always in-touch with what users are looking for and meets their expectations.

Check out our voice chatbot page to see what we have to offer. Not sure what features are right for your business? Our experts can help! Reach out to the Beyond Voice team using our contact form to learn more.

The post Creating a Great Customer Experience Using a Chatbot in 7 Steps appeared first on Beyond Key.

The pace at which people have started accepting chatbots in their day-to-day life compels us to look to the future of this cutting-edge technology. Artificial Intelligence, NLP, machine learning and voice chatbots: all of them have given a serious boost to chatbots and made them smarter day by day. We are already comparing the way chatbots are now made responsive just like any human being, but does that mean we’ll soon see Chatbots replace humans? Well, the answer will always be ‘no.’ Humans have created chatbots and the technology which makes them work, and that will always be like that.

Chatbots have seen their increased acceptability in almost all industry verticals. More and more consumers are raising inclination towards the use of chatbots. The developmental trends of 2019 suggest that chatbots will be prepared to easily offer services which were previously only performed by human beings.

Let’s understand the 9 most probable trends for the development of chatbots in 2019.

1. Chatbots bringing revolution in technology and reach

Besides hand held devices and mobile phones, Chatbots have marked their presence on almost all social media channels and are now integrated with voice-based assistants like Alexa and Google Home. Enterprises are finding them an efficient and cost-effective way to give customer support around the clock. With advancement in technology like Machine Learning, chatbot training has become so automated and easy that they are becoming smarter. Artificial intelligence has given capability to chatbots to think somewhat like humans and NLP has made them understand human tone so well!

2. Voice chatbots making a big show

No one wants to type or read long messy sentences for a simple answer. Voice is the simple answer to this problem. Voice chatbots have been devised so customers don’t need to type in their questions or read out long sentences searching for their specific questions. Our Beyond Key Voice chatbot has also been developed with the same ability of talking. You can simply feed in your questions as an audio input and get an answer as audio output. Check out our voice chatbot features here.

3. Voice Chatbot more responsive as human beings

With the advancement of Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence in today’s world, chatbot services are becoming more human-like and impeccable. Machine Learning skills have empowered bots with smooth training processes. Training of dumb chatbots has become so easy that companies do not mind investing in training bots rather than people! At least, they don’t resign after so much hard work!

On top of this, NLP has given a new edge to these robots. They can now listen to your voice commands in any accent and try to understand what you are talking about. If they find a suitable answer, they speak out or else abort the process or move you to a human agent for further conversation.

4. Machine learning utilized to next level

Ever wonder how Google and Facebook are always ready with ideas that interest you? With the integration of Machine Learning, chatbots are also built to understand your likings, needs, and requirements. Complete human-like conversation might not be in the cards soon, but with the integration of Machine Learning to build neural conversational agents, Voice Chatbots will be able to do more than just set alarms and make calls.

As the chatbots learn and act, companies can look forward to greater customer satisfaction and improved interaction. With chatbots adapting to the customer’s mood, revenues are bound to increase.

5. Flawless user experience due to NLP

Natural Language Programming (NLP) aids in providing a human experience and making chatbots interactive. They are empowered to easily understand questions with multiple utterances or the same question put forth in different ways.

Q: What is your age?

Q: How old are you?

The answer to both these questions is the same, but NLP helps the chatbot to understand the intent of the user and reply accordingly.

6. Bots for every industry vertical

Chatbots have been used in every industry and business for serving various purposes. Be it the banking industry to retail and consumer goods or education, healthcare, travel and tourism industry to big corporations trying to streamline their complex business process, Chatbots have found their space in virtually every industry domain and process.

Banks have enabled their customers to interact with chatbots to clarify banking queries. They can access and ask for account balances, bank statements, to transfer funds, create a deposit, saving and investment advice, and so on. People could use bots as personal fashion advisors for clothing recommendations, or ask trading tips from a finance bot, suggest places to visit from a travel bot, and so forth. Chatbots can sell your products for you because they’re online 24/7. Some chatbots are simply meant to quickly answer customers’ questions like FAQs.

At BeyondKey, we have also developed a FAQ Chatbot which can help you with quick responses in no time and help you save hours of customer support with lots of bucks as well.

7. Voice Bots replacing apps

This is particularly a thing of future. Virtual assistants are becoming more and more common. Just ask people whether they prefer to speak to Google or Siri to find or open something or going to the app and finding the information by texting. The answer with be speaking to Voice assistants or chatbots!

While the idea might seem a little farfetched right now, apps may start to become a thing of the past. This change almost certainly wouldn’t be a sudden one that everyone would have to adhere to at once, but the time is coming. For some people, apps have already phased out as chatbots become more reliable. So while the future of apps is uncertain, for Voice chatbots, it’s something to talk about loudly.

8. Chatbots present on every social media platform

Enterprises have understood one thing very well that now consumer demands have changed. They want you to be there where and when consumers are living with questions.

Social media presence makes you versatile, so our Chatbots are present on every social media platform available. Our chatbot developers have given the integration ability of chatbots with your fav social media sites, like websites, Facebook Messenger, Skype, Teams, Slack, Viber, Line, Telegram, Kik, Mobile SDK, and many more coming soon.

9. Chatbots giving new edge to customer support and answering simple questions

Chatbots are extremely helpful when customers are looking to solve simple tasks like changing passwords, answering basic questions from a FAQ list, or searching for a specific product from the huge product range of an online seller. Customers are excited to engage with robots especially when they exhibit some sense of humor or a personality that’s similar to a real human.

When you program your chatbot well, it can respond to customers’ messages instantly using your brand’s voice.

Happy to help!

BeyondKey has been exploring the vertical of conversational AI for many years now. With our adept team of developers, we have proudly helped clients in different verticals maintain their chatbots, from answering simple questions to customizing conversation flows. If you are an enterprise looking to implement voice chatbots, our team of experts would be happy to listen to your idea and help. Reach out to us for more information.

The post 9 Amazing Trends in Voice Chatbot to Watch in 2019 appeared first on Beyond Key.