Chatbot Myths: Bots are easy to build
Today I'm looking at the infamous phrase: 'Bots are easy to build' and the truth is that there are free tools which offer the functionality to build a bot. However, without the knowledge & experience to build a bot you are likely to do more harm than good to your brand.
The tech isn't the hard part, the technology to build bots is everywhere but building an effective bot which adds value is much harder than most people realise. When approaching the build of a conversational bot, you should focus on the user experience instead of focussing on the bot functionality.
Various brands have had bad experiences when building bots using the free technology not due to the technology but due to the conversational tree and user journeys that they've used.
Understanding how the end-user interacts with the experience and how it adds value to them should be used as the building blocks. Instead of focussing on providing the user with 100 different bits of tech/functionality, ask the questions:
* "What problem are you trying to solve?"
* "How is this going to add value"
* "How is this going to improve someone's quality of life"
Best Practice for building Messaging Experiences:
Persona's
Personalising the Messaging experience for the end-user by adding a Persona to the bot helps improve the experience and shows when the bot is responding instead of a human
Storytelling
Within the Messaging experience don't flood the user with walls of text that is an information overload. Tell a story and keep it light hearted and ensure the brand personality is being clearly communicated
Creative media use
Include as much media in the experience as possible to break the walls of text the user is receiving, animated .Gif's & videos are a great way to enrich the end-user experience
Constant optimisation
Ongoing changes to the user journeys is a must, use the analytics available, see where the users are dropping off and how much time they are spending in the experience. There are also valuable insights in what questions users are asking which aren't catered for in the experience, this is where you can find the easy wins to improve the experience.
Knowledge, research and experience is your most important tools when configuring a messaging experience. After having built 30+ bots, you can easily spot the potential pitfalls of an experience and using past experience you can quickly help improve the user journeys.
Which is why it is in your best interest to have someone with the necessary knowledge help you configure your bot, otherwise you might be the next brand in the news for a "Bot mishap".
