Have you ever been in chat with a customer service representative and had a conversation that lasted for minutes, only to end with the customer service representative walking away and leaving you with an unanswered question? Chances are you can relate to this frustrating experience.
Research has shown that chatbots are one of the most effective ways to increase customer satisfaction. In fact, a 2016 study conducted by the providers of the world’s largest customer loyalty program found that chatbots were up to twice as effective as customer service representatives for customer satisfaction. This is why it is so crucial for businesses to take advantage of chatbots. However, chatbots are not without their flaws. In fact, they often have usability flaws that restrict their effectiveness.
Chatbots make a lot of sense for eCommerce websites. They can provide a personal, conversational experience to your customers, as well as aid in the overall customer experience by providing a smooth and seamless experience. The only problem is that most people initially think that chatbots are only for apps when in reality, they can be used on websites too.
In this guide, we explore 10 ways to improve your website chatbots. The steps include understanding what your website chatbots should do, developing a chatbot plan, designing and building a chatbot, and managing and maintaining your chatbot.
What are ways of improving the Website Chatbot Functionality?
Chatbots are becoming more and more popular and many businesses are investing in them for marketing purposes. These virtual assistants can help with customer service and marketing tasks, as well as provide a more accessible point of contact for consumers. However, developing a successful chatbot can be difficult.
- Explore an ample amount of queries.
- Give it a personality or identity.
- Implement the latest scripts.
- Always improve on customers’ responses.
- Connect the intents of Chatbots with the Goal of Business.
- Use words and phrases that are simple and user-friendly.
- Let your Chatbot be More Human-like.
- Avoid Skeptical replies.
- Always Scan the discussion between customers and Chatbot.
- Use systematic analysis to measure the performance.
Let’s have a detailed explanation of all the above-mentioned ways to Escalate the Smooth functioning of Website Chatbots.
10 Ways to Escalate the Smooth Functioning of Website Chatbots.
Explore an ample amount of queries.
It is rightly said that every experience gives greater clarity of vision and a sense of maturity. The more questions that the chatbot deals with the more it learns about the frequently asked questions and queries by the customers. Customers have never-ending curiosity regarding the purchase they made or are planning to make in the future.
Hence the more queries the business acquires the more opportunities it gathers to expand its product. The queries define the number of words and phrases that need to be installed in the Chatbots.
Also Read: Know how to boost customer experience in e-commerce business by customer service best practices
The more questions the Chatbot answers the more it can understand the customer’s needs and ultimately update its database automatically to serve them in a better way.
The natural language understanding of your chatbots may be limited at the beginning, which is understandable. Perhaps you should add keywords and phrases to its understanding scope.
Give it a personality or identity.
To stand alone in this competitive era, it is very important to give your chatbot a unique identity and personality. The chatbot can have its name, image, unique style of greeting the customers, appropriate medium, and also different categories to serve the customer.
- Name- The chatbot is given a particular name, which stands for its identity like a human being.
- Image- The Chatbot with an image sometimes a cartoon effect, helps to connect with the customers like an actual human agent.
- Greeting style- This can be according to the region and culture it is serving. Due to the multilinguistic approach, it is flexible and easy to chat according to customers’ preferences.
Implement the latest scripts.
It is said rightly that nothing is constant but change. So is with the websites and the chatbots that are integrated with it. Through different conversations with varieties of human beings having different cognitive levels, chatbots need a constant check on the latest way of conversation.
Fashion exists everywhere, the way you walk, dress up, and even the way you talk. Traditionally chatbots are just to greet the customer and share one or two-piece of information that are implemented in it but today’s chatbots are so intellectual that they can take the conversation to next level.
This is only because the chatbots are implemented with the latest scripts and a feature to keep themselves updated through an ample amount of chats.
Always improve on customers’ responses.
The constant way of improving your bot is to learn from the past and the present event that happened during the conversation between the bot and customers. The experience helps to analyze how the customer thinks of the product and service and also the conversational system.
The Business should always consider the traffic, the number of queries, the feedback, the variety of questions they ask, etc. A small part of the information is immensely important to train the bot to serve better the customers.
The best part of using the history is when we know what they are going to ask, we design the answers in such a way that it will enhance the overall experience of the customer.
These techniques will also help to understand why the bot is unable to answer certain questions. If the business simplifies such answers and helps the customer to understand them in a lot easier manner, it will provide additional business opportunities.
Connect the intents of Chatbots with the Goal of Business
Build a Chatbot that matches the genre of the business and its requirements. So you need to understand what a bot is integrated with the Website. And What does the business thrives to achieve after installing a bot on the Website?
The area on the Website which requires automation should also be identified before integrating it with the website. Generally, the main aim of creating a Chatbot on a website is as follows:
- Generates leads and open new business opportunities and horizons.
- Make the customers Aquaint with the product and services.
- Cater to multiple and complex queries.
- Serve with uniformity when there are repetitive questions asked by the customers.
- The rich source of information and areas of improvement with the help of customers’ reactions and feedback.
Use words and phrases that are simple and user-friendly.
When the bot is configured with simple and easy language, it helps to connect with the customer in a better way rather than using high five-word that customers have to google to understand what the bot is trying to say.
The best bots are the one that uses friendly and Straightforward language without any confusion to understand by a layman. To give a feel of human chatting on the other side of the screen, the bot should also be inculcated with easy language.
A regular check on the interactions should be conducted so that any complication or relevance can be traced out and rectified for a seamless customer experience.
Let your bot be More Human-like
When the bot is trained to understand the words and phrases and provide relevant answers to them, the plan is considered successful. The main aim of installing the bot is an imitation of human behaviour and understand the sentiments of the customers on the other side of the screen.
The Customer at some point knows that they are interacting with the chatbot, but it’s on the configuration of the chatbot that they will analyze how complex is the query and when it should be transferred to human agents.
The next aspect to take care of is to keep on changing the mistakes done by the bot. The bot should also try to give a fun-loving environment to the customers to keep them engaged in the conversation.
Avoid Skeptical replies.
If the bots give irrelevant replies to the customer they no longer are in the book of trust that the customers carry in their minds all the time. Sometimes the bot becomes part of memes and hence will never be used for serious business purposes.
This happens when they are not programmed with frequently asked questions by the customers. The best thing you can do is record the number of times the bot replied with irrelevant and meaningless answers. The next thing that we can do is find the source of the error and rectify it.
When the bot fails to understand the word in the conversion, program the chatbot which diverts the attention by asking them about similar relative queries.
Always Scan the discussion between customers and Chatbot.
To keep the bot the discussion needs to be monitored and scanned regularly. The Chatbot generates the report of individual customers considering their history and behaviour of purchase.
The duration of the customer’s engagement and the time taken to reach the purchase or checkout page to complete the transaction can be easily tracked through the scanning of the conversation.
Even the customer’s difficulties to communicate at certain levels can be identified easily if we monitor the flow of conversation.
For visitors transitioning quickly, your bot should close them as soon as possible. You will likely lose people passing through if you apply a long conversational flow to cater to all visitors.
Use systematic analysis to measure the performance.
The reach of the bot and its effectiveness can only be measured when we have a systematic way of measuring its scalability. Chatbots help to generate reports regularly.
If these generated reports are kept aside without analysis, the bot will remain just a tool for conversation. Analysis and updating walk together hand in hand. Here you identify the source of the error, there you take the measures to rectify it.
Hence a perfect and systematic analysis of performance considering the conversation ratio should be considered an important course of action that requires to be completed by the business.
Conclusion: Know better about Chatbots
One of our main goals as a company is to innovate and stay ahead of the game. That’s why bots are here to help brands optimize their websites and bots. We wanted to share 10 different ways to improve the website bots. These are a few of the many ways that brands are using to make the experience better for consumers.
