How to Develop a Chatbot Persona That Fits Your Brand
Recent statistics about the global chatbot market are encouraging for businesses: global monthly active users on the four top messaging apps topped that of the four top social networks in 2015 and continues to do so. The market is expect to reach $1.23 billion by 2025!
Like any marketing tool, a chatbot is a great opportunity to add value to customer interactions. While it’s easy (and exciting) to get caught up with developing cool new functions or adding useful integrations to your next bot, you should first establish an important foundation by asking yourself: “What persona should this chatbot have?”
Why personas matter
Experienced online marketers are familiar with “buyer personas” and “user personas” — strategic tools that help businesses identify their ideal customer (buyer) or end user. These personas can be enormously helpful when you’re trying to fine-tune an offer or a marketing campaign to appeal to certain audiences. For chatbot developers, they’re only half the battle.
That’s because a chatbot isn’t just a marketing tool. In many cases, it’s also the most direct way for tech-savvy customers to interact with a brand or business. This 1:1 nature of chatbots should influence the way you design its flows, broadcasts, and campaigns.
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Think about the last chat you had with a friend or loved one through Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, or SMS. You don’t write or respond to them the same way via email as you do when you’re chatting. It’s closer. It’s more personal.
Your customers might not think of your chatbot as their friend, but they willnaturally interact with it in a direct, personal way if you build the bot’s responses to anticipate a back-and-forth conversation.
These personal interactions can create, in your customers’ minds, a greater sense of connection and loyalty to your brand than what you might achieve with emails or websites or social media posts. But if your chatbot doesn’t have a well-defined persona, this loyalty can easily be lost.
That’s why personas are doubly important to chatbot developers. Developing a buyer or user persona helps you to better understand your customers. Creating a chatbot persona helps you connect and forge stronger relationships with your customers by enforcing a standard approach to your chatbot’s content.
The two types of chatbot personas
The first thing to determine, in the process of developing your chatbot persona, is whether your chatbot will serve as a representative of an individual person or an organizational brand.
This is easy for most businesses to figure out.
Is your business’ name “Bob’s Coaching Service”? Does one person lend their name and writing and/or speaking style to all your business’ communications with its customers? That’s an individual-led business, and you’re better off developing a chatbot that reflects, but doesn’t necessarily imitate, that individual’s style and attitudes.
A company named “ChatbotCo” or “Facebook” with multiple people lending their names to public-facing communications is typically a brand-led business. A chatbot for this sort of business should speak in a voice that reflects the values and beliefs of its brand. This can be more involved than basing a chatbot persona on a single person, but it can be done just as well.
Larger established companies may have developed their own brand persona guidelines that can guide your development from step one. However, if you’re a chatbot developer, you may have many opportunities to help smaller and younger businesses develop their brand persona from the ground up. That’s valuable work in its own right.
Developing a persona for your chatbot
There are 12 archetypes commonly used to define a brand persona, which are functionally identical to the 12 Jungian archetypes. There are many tests and visual representations of the 12 archetypes that can help you and your clients determine what brand persona your chatbot should express. Here’s one good example:
The archetypes are a starting point. You’ll still need to fill in the details of your persona.
When developing a chatbot based on an individual, knowing that individual’s archetype (or archetypes — it’s certainly possible to express the traits of multiple archetypes), and the way they express that archetype in their written and spoken communications, can help you develop new content for the bot with a consistent voice.
Working with a brand without a clearly-defined brand persona makes the selection of an archetype more of a first step. The individual-led business already has someone on which to base their chatbot’s persona and voice. Your goal with a brand-led business is to create a person or character on which you can base your chatbot’s voice.
Try to select a persona image. This is nothing more than the person, animal, or object your brand would look like if it were brought to life. Dos Equis has the Most Interesting Man in the World. GEICO has a helpful gecko with a British accent.
You may not be able to visualize a clear image of your brand’s persona just yet. If that’s the case, use the archetype you’ve selected to list the core traits of the brand, like making life more interesting, or being helpfully British and saving you 15% or more on your car insurance.
From the archetype, core traits, and persona image you can start fleshing out the brand’s personality and speaking (or messaging) voice. You should give your chatbot a name as well, if it doesn’t already have one. Once you’ve got a clear idea of what your brand would be if it could talk, you can start figuring out how its chatbot should talk.
With chatbots, you have the opportunity to use all sorts of emojis, images, videos, and other additional attachments and functionality in addition to text. It can be tempting to use something just to use it. Ask yourself “would Chatbot (insert your own name here) use this in a conversation with his friends and/or customers?” about any new element you want to throw into your bot’s flows and broadcasts.
Write these specifications down and apply them consistently. If more than one person creates content for your chatbot, make sure they understand the chatbot’s persona and how to express that through the medium of messaging apps.
Keeping the voice of your chatbot consistent, recognizable, and relatable from week to week and broadcast to broadcast will help engage customers and sustain their loyalty. A chatbot might be the way most customers interact with many brands. Make sure yours stands out.
Want to learn more about developing a chatbot that’s right for your brand? Check out our Bot Design, Performance, and Strategy Tracks at Business of Bots 2019.
Business of Bots 2019 will gather leading company profiles and top minds to share insider tips and explore how BOTS will impact business — leaving you with tangible takeaways you can apply to your own strategy right when you get back to the office.
