Watch Your Mouth: Key Considerations for Developing Chatbots

Today’s consumers demand relevant, personalized content and instantaneous access to information at all hours of the day. With closer access to brands through social and messaging channels, chatbots have proven to be an effective way for organizations to strike a deeper connection with users, whether they be consumers or employees.

There are several different use cases for a chatbot; it can help you provide always-on customer service, provide personalized content to users in regular intervals, help your organization proactively screen job applicants and do much more. In essence, the main benefit that chatbots provide is the automation of routine, repetitive and simple tasks to make processes more efficient. They’re also an excellent source of user behavioral data, including finding patterns in terms used, most popular queries, user demographics and more. All these benefits help brands maintain a more direct, constant connection with consumers—if they’re designed with some key considerations in mind.

Before Building, Balance Benefits and Demand

Unlike a human, a chatbot is available at a moment’s notice, 24/7. Think of bots as modern, more interactive and relevant FAQ lists at its simplest level, but be aware that they are capable of doing much more, like engaging with users based on their surroundings. Whether it be providing entertainment or self-service troubleshooting, chatbots allow brands to provide services without the need for human intervention (though in some cases a human takeover is recommended, like solving more complex tasks or providing support in emotionally charged scenarios).

That said, chatbots aren’t the right fit for everyone. Before you invest in building one for your brand, consider your target demographic and the value you wish for the bot to provide. A lack of desire for automation can cause frustration for users who must use a chatbot. There may also be a learning curve to adapt to a new technology depending on your demographic, which can lead to more problems than solutions overall. A good method for determining whether a chatbot is right for your organization is to weigh the potential benefits with user desire or demand.

Know How to Set the Tone

A chatbot serves as a notable channel for representing a brand voice. Far from a frivolous thing, an attractive voice and personality can be incredibly beneficial for brands. Microsoft’s Xiaoice chatbot, for example, employs advanced emotional intelligence to carry humanlike, nuanced conversations with users. With the persona of a teenage girl, the AI is so popular in China that she has achieved celebrity status, according to Microsoft.

But Xiaoice is just one fraction of a larger AI framework, and her underlying mechanisms power branded, third-party characters as well. So, what’s the value in these bots’ trademark small talk and chit-chat that has made them so popular with Eastern users—and what does it mean for chatbots that are designed to accomplish a specific task or organizational goal? The value lies in providing social capital by keeping users engaged, allowing for deeper emotional connections.

Given the power of a good voice, brands interested in the technology should consider the tone of voice and identity that fits their brand. While a consumer-facing bot has the freedom and flexibility to speak in a more casual tone, one that’s intended for employee use should take on a more professional persona. Will your bot speak to users in gifs? Will it offer emoji-based button responses? Is it lazy, or energetic? These are some questions you can ask to envision the personality your bot can take. Have fun with it!

Earn Users’ Trust

Chatbots are excellent at providing relevancy and personalization in their messaging to users—and they accomplish that by leveraging data gathered across the course of conversation or even through external sources (more on that below). For users to feel comfortable sharing their data with organizations, the value that data provides must be clear.  Chatbots are ideal for this because they can walk users through an onboarding process that asks permissions for data, clearly explaining why it’s necessary at each step.

As users interact with a chatbot, they get instant feedback about how that data informs the user experience. For example, a bot with knowledge of a user’s home and work addresses can prove lifesaving for finding one’s way at rush hour when transit services change. While users might find most data collection and practices to be esoteric and opaque, the question-and-answer approach (not to mention the personality) of chatbots makes this process more transparent. And once that data is in their hands, organizations can also use it to discover new trends or forecast emerging user needs, thereby improving the experience even more.

Architecture and Maintenance

Speaking of data collection, an effective chatbot requires an architecture that plugs into one or several data sources. This might include data you already have about the user (for example, a retailer pulling from a user’s purchasing history), knowledge bases that troubleshoot common questions, partner data or other sources. Whatever data sources you pull from, you must ensure your chatbot’s architecture supports it—and be prepared to add more if and when it becomes necessary. When in doubt, consider partnering with a developer who can audit your data sources and build an architecture equipped to plug into these forms of data.

On that note, to develop a chatbot is to commit to the long haul: it’s important to iterate and optimize the bot for a better user experience based on the feedback collected, whether it be explicit comments from users or implicit usage data. One major example of this is expanding your market and localizing chatbot content to match. Brands must be sure they’re ready to scale up the growing capabilities of a chatbot to accommodate emerging user behaviors—though if they don’t have the resources, a creative partner experienced in tooling assets at scale for a global audience can be of help.

A chatbot can make for a valuable service to your audience, whether its focus is on consumers or employees. But conversation is an artform, and just like any artist, you need a vision and tools in place to deliver the experience you seek for your users. Having established that, your brand is ready to say “Hello” to deeper, closer relationships with your audience.