8 Mistakes you must Avoid while Building a Chatbot
Chatbots are the new mobile apps. And building a chatbot is not as hard you think. But when done wrong, you could spend tens of thousands dollars & weeks in building a chatbot only to find out that it does not work and no one uses it!
Here are some of the mistakes that you must avoid while building a Chatbot and in the long-term ensure effective decision making directed towards putting the efforts of creating Chatbots in the right direction.
1. Not having a clear Goal in mind
Imagine you hire a person in your team without thinking about her job responsibility or Goal for the organisation. Do you think the new hire will ever be able to perform well. Similarly, while designing a Chatbot, you need to have clear Goal in mind. Whether you need a chatbot for increasing sales or you need the chatbot to support existing customers. You need to have a crystal clear goal defined.
2. Not selecting the Right Use Case
Chatbots are great but they are still far from perfect. We must understand that current chatbots are not as intelligent as human beings and thus we need to define clear use case that we want our chatbots to handle. For everything else, there should be a human in the loop who can handle the queries which can’t be handled by the chatbot.
3. Launching the Chatbot without Testing it
While building a chatbot, we might have some preconceived notions. We might think that users will talk with the bot in certain way but in reality, users might talk to the chatbot in completely different way. Therefore it is very important that as a business owner or as a chatbot developer, you should get your chatbot throughly tested with real users as much as possible before launching it publicly.
4. Not tracking the Chatbot performance
A chatbot is just like a new born baby. It does not know anything about your business or this world. It needs to be trained with data and information. But just like a new hire might not perform well during initial days of his job, the chatbot also might not perform well initially. Therefore it is very important to track the performance of the chatbot. You need to monitor the type of response given by the chatbot and correct it in case the response given by the chatbot is incorrect.
5. Focussing too much on creating Flow based Chatbots
Flow based chatbots can’t adapt to natural and variable tone of conversation that humans normally use. Customers generally like to talk in natural language but if your bot fails to understand that, it usually leads to bad customer experience. Therefore it is very important to focus not only on creating flow based chatbots but also a chatbot which can understand natural language. The reason chatbots became popular was because they promised that now humans can talk to machines in natural language but if you still force your customers to select 1, 2 or press buttons than that natural conversational experience is gone and it is like forcing them back to old school IVR system.
6. Not using Human Agents
No matter how advanced chatbot you create, it is possible that your bot fails to answer a genuine question for some reason. To handle such edge cases, you need to make sure that there is a human in the loop which can take over conversation in case bot is unable to handle the queries. If you don’t do this and if the users are stuck with a bot which is unable to answer their queries, it will lead to very bad customer experience for your users and it might even negatively impact your business reputation.
7. Pretending to be human
Some chatbot designers designs their chatbots to pretend that they are humans. It is better not to deceive your website visitors this way because when they realise it is a bot, it leaves a very negative impression in their mind for the business. It is better that your chatbot right away tell that “I am a bot and I can answer your generic questions. If you need any help, just say help and I will connect you to the available human agent”. That way your customers will feel happy and they will be compelled to try out the chatbot knowing that if the bot cannot handle their queries, they still have the option to talk to a real human.
8. Too long conversational text or responses
Always make sure to keep the chatbot responses short and crips. Make it a rule that response in one bubble should not be more than 3 lines max. If you need to respond with longer text, break it into another bubble. But again 2 bubbles at max. More than this will become information overload and your users might not feel like going through all that text. You can use images or videos to convey information rather than keeping everything in text.
There are most basic things you must keep in mind while designing and developing your chatbots. If you need more help or have any questions related to chatbots, feel free to email us at contact@axlewebtech.com or visit our website www.axlewebtech.com
