SUMMARY : Does your business have a contact number, email, website, mobile- app, social media accounts and you operate on print and digital advertising to reach prospective consumers? Then it is a right time you should learn more about chatbots and evaluate the use cases that best meet the business offering. Every business has set of repetitive or sequential(ordered) tasks. Identify these, consult with internal and external experts to build automation rules and present them as part of the chatbot interface. The chatbot for your business should be clear, useful, efficient, reliable, provide value and quality. The chatbot should make it easy to display your services and product offering to prospective consumers.
Whether you operate a single person business on youtube, facebook or are a large business with a large call center and customer service agents, chatbots span to meet the need. Let’s discuss a few points to consider when evaluating the use cases
CLARITY – Without being too wordy, make it known to consumer if they are interating with an agent or an automated flow. Set expectations right, inform the user(consumer) what to expect from the chatbot conversation.
- “Find a rate that is good for you!” – these apply to Insurance, Mortgage or other compare shop, lending industry.
- “Check out our extensive inventory” – Real Estate, Car Sales, Buy/Sell eCommerce businesses
- “Browse, Order, Pay and Schedule pickup” – restaurant, boutiques
- “Schedule an appointment right now with one of our XXXXX” – realtor, physician, nutritionist, salon stylist, lawyer, home service – applicable to Lead Gen Affiliate sites or to businesses that have several business agents.
USEFULNESS – The chatbot should be more than a place to “collect contact information”. The chatbot should be powered for consumers to gather information, explore options and transact/convert/subscribe to a monetizing event. If a chatbot can make it easy to close the lead, so be it!
How many shoppers on Amazon.com ever need an actual agent interaction? If you can provide the speed, clarity and ease to transact fast, your consumers will definitely love it. Of course in situations or services where human interaction is mandatory, provide options to connect-now, chat-now or schedule appointment.
EFFICIENCY – Emphasize of systematic grouping of consumer engagement topics. If you operate a Buy/Sell business model, you want to be sure the chatbot is well isolated by topics specific to
- Buy – concentrated at potential buyers. The workflow should be streamlined to meet buyer needs.
- Sell – the flow should be specific to “Seller” existing and new prospects. Signup, Background Check, Verification Document Submission, Commission or other related material should be readily available.
- Along with other common information about process, security, FAQ or Connect to an Agent features.
RELIABILITY – Chatbot engagement and interaction experience should be impressive, and all information presented should be reliable. When asking for sensitive information inform the security measures taken to protect the data. This could be presented in form of a link to a page or display any compliance/security codes if applicable.
Inform the consumer of any backend outages or delivery failures so that the consumer can check again later. Alternatively you may request contact info so that you inform by SMS or email.
Reliable state management is important so that returning anonymous and identified visitors can recollect what information they shared and continue. Map the information collected, so that the same data is not requested for again. In case the customer shared any sensitive information, be sure the interface obfuscates or hides the information before checking the idendity of return visitor.
The consumer should feel safe about engaging and sharing information with the chatbot. Run the chatbot workflow through security experts to ensure all measures are taken for consumer information protection.
Hope you enjoyed this write up and found it useful. Chatbots are great for business when built and presented correctly. Do not hurry to put together a chatbot, but do not delay getting a chatbot for your business either. Get started today! _______________________
For more articles on Chat and Voice solutions, explore our blog or reach to us with comments/feedback and questions here.
Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com on January 23, 2018.
To learn more about Botsplash click the button below to schedule a demo with our team.
