Why the chatbot avatar doesn’t matter
(as much as you think)
Should it be a man, or a woman? Should it look like a human or robot?
The Avatar, or visual representation, of a chatbot seems to be causing some debate.
It’s really easy for everyone to have an opinion about it because it’s so visual. Within a millisecond you know whether or not you like a certain design.
Some people value that the chatbot has human traits and says “it’s jazzing up the conversation”. Others says we need a clear distinction between humans and robots.
I used to believe that the avatar mattered a lot, now I’m not so sure.
In-depth interviews with our customers shows surprisingly little focus on the visual presentation of the chatbot itself.
In a userstudy together with SINTEF, we asked customers who had just talked to our chatbot to reflect upon the visual appearance. Only a small minority (3 out of 24) participants considered the avatar to be important for the user experience.
However, participants put far more weight into the presentation of the conversation, meaning the words. Is the language easy to understand? Does the bot give meaningful options? Is there a good balance between giving answer in the chat vs sending customers on the website to read more? Conversational design is fundamental to unlock the value of a chatbot.
It’s important to remember the customer’s journey. Why is the customer talking to your chatbot? Most likely because he or she has a specific need in mind. The customer has limited time and just want to get the issue resolved as soon as possible. Efficiency above all.
For my own sake, whenever I contact customer service I don’t care wether I talk to Lisa, John, or ‘Bob the chatbot’ as long as I get an answer. I certainly don’t care wether ‘Bob the chatbot’ has a beard or not.
“The most important for the user experience is whether the chatbot understand what I’m asking, and gives an appropriate answer.”
That’s why shaping meaningful conversations in the bot should be your primary focus and were you should focus your attention. Along with making sure you have the right people dedicated to so.
Lastly, writing this made me think about Apple’s voice assistant Siri. Siri has no visual representation other than a few ripples! Some might argue that because Siri is only a voice interface there shouldn’t be an avatar. But Apple could easily have made an avatar for Siri. It’s not like there isn’t a screen on an iPhone, yet they decided not to. Maybe Apple knew something that we didn’t when we started to develop Nova.
