How to Build an #eCommerce Bot Your Customers Will Love
Ecommerce chatbots are amazing… No, wait. Let me rephrase that. Ecommerce chatbots are amazing if they are created the right way. Have you ever talked to a chatbot and you keep getting stuck over and over again? It drives you crazy. Ecommerce chatbots can be super easy to mess up, but creating an awesome eCommerce chatbot that will increase your sales, engage with your customers and boost your customer support, is pretty damn hard. There is a lot to think about when creating your bot.
In this article, I will give you a few guidelines you can follow when you are creating your awesome bot. This will help your customers keep their temper and you won’t ruin their day. I’m going to try to keep it as simple as I can, but if you get confused, don’t give up! KEEP GOING!
When you are creating your chatbot, you have to be aware of your average customer. Is your core customer a 60-year woman who doesn’t use computers that much, but she does go on one because she loves your online store? Okay, maybe that’s not likely, but I’ll use that example to prove my point. If so, then I don’t think emojis and memes are the way to go. Then you really have to be formal, few memes to confuse the customer and overall polite. If your core customer is 60 years old, your bot should be 60 years old.
Are you selling fidget spinners? No worries. Then I’m guessing your average customer age is around 20. Go all out on the smileys, memes and funny words. Get wild. If your core customer is a 20 year old fidget spinner lover, your bot should be a 20 year old fidget spinner lover.
A good persistent menu == happy customer
When your customer starts chatting with your eCommerce chatbot, my guess is that they are interested in your product(s). If you run a physical store, then the customer might also be interested in your opening hours. To help a customer avoid getting stuck in a conversation with your bot, your persistent menu is crucial. Having things like ‘Categories’, ‘Opening hours’ and ‘Go to website’ will definitely help your customer find what they are looking for. You might think ‘Go to website’ is weird, but you have to accept that your chatbot isn’t perfect, it doesn’t understand everything and can get stuck. If so, redirecting your customer to your website is a good move in order to keep your customer viewing your products, whether it’s in a chatbot or website, is important.
Today’s chatbots are not human. Strangely.
Trying too much is not a good thing. Your chatbot will never be human, or at least for now. Chatbot user experience is always improving and the technology behind bots are getting better at understanding human language. When your bot doesn’t understand something, it should respond with something like ‘I didn’t understand what you were saying. You can always go to our website www.yourwebsite.com or if you want to chat to a real person I can easily arrange that.’
Replying something like ‘Okay.’ when your chatbot doesn’t understand will end up in your customer leaving and a bad user experience for your store.
Today, you always need to think of your chatbot like a machine that can only follow a set of rules. It can’t be human, so don’t try to make it be human.
It’s not easy. Accept that.
You will definitely break a sweat over your new chatbot, I’ll guarantee that. In the beginning, your bot might not understand some simple conversations and you might get some crazy customer responses get crazy customer emails, but if you keep adapting and evolving your bot, it’s the best technology to fully understand your customers.
Creating a good chatbot is not easy, let’s face it. It can be painful. But it’s getting better, really really fast. There are thousands of bot developers now and the technology is constantly improving. Good luck!
Originally published at blog.botlist.co on July 6, 2017.
