Winning in the Chatbot Space: What we’ve learnt
Entering the chatbot space?
Here are our key learnings having spent the past year learning from chatbot industry pioneers, most recently at TNW and Chatbot Summit.
Role of a bot building platform
Simply put, a platform’s role is to help its community of bot creators be successful. If those building bots on your platform can’t build successful products using your technology, why would they come back? They won’t!
Their success is your success.
This means foreseeing the common challenges in bot development, helping each bot creator jump each hurdle.
Aligning content strategy to meet these needs is vital, which is why we are committing to produce resources including step by step guides for each of:
– Conversation and persona design process
– Discovery
– Engagement
– Retention
– Monetization
– Industry success stories
Focus when starting out:
Create an end to end user experience which is great for one customer segment. It’s too easy to start building your product by committee and have a backlog of unfocused features. This holds true for bot platforms as much as it does for bot developers.
To paraphrase Stephen Broadhurst of IBM’s Conversational UX team, the mission of a bot developer is to understand the use cases in which conversation is the best solution. Set expectations, and very clearly state the use case for which the bot solves during the onboarding process.
A bot should be a Minimum Viable Interaction and perform that interaction better than any other medium.
This is where we see the value in a marketplace and modular design, a series of Minimum viable interactions that can be pieced together.
Pick a platform, customer segment, and service and make it a great UX.
See Poncho for the perfect example of this.
Adoption: What’s working, what’s not?
Tom Hewitson, Conversation Designer at Labworks puts it succinctly.
“The big strength of bots is that they’re lightweight, have no learning curve and are instantly accessible — this makes them great for interacting with services that you use infrequently, where you don’t want to establish a new mental model. It’s wrong to expect bots to have the same kind of retention as apps.”
In order to win out in transactional situations, bots need to perform tasks significantly better than other mediums, however, we may be wrong to judge by the same retention metrics we do an App. It will be interesting to see how this plays out for bot-first companies, and this challenge affects revenue.
Sancar Sahin, Marketing Director at Typeform believes the potential of bots goes beyond transactional experiences.
“Is the purpose of a chatbot solely to make things faster? I don’t think so. Rather, a chatbot allows you to engage with a user on a more personal level and because of that start a relationship. The process may take longer but the experience can be more pleasant, engaging, and because of that more information can be extracted from conversation over time.”
Multi-disciplinary community
Bot building is way more than a developer’s responsibility. Our technology, raw, off the shelf, is not the user experience that the end user will fall in love with. Companies have brands, images, to uphold. Their bot needs to meet these needs.
Solutions on the market as we see it are still heavily developer centric . This in part due to it’s infancy, but something we’re committing to correcting. In partnership with Botcube, a bot first development agency we’ll soon be launching a community for the whole Bot ecosystem focussed on value and non self promo content.
So if you’re one of the following with a track record of producing content we want to hear from you.
- Conversation / UX Designer
- Developer
- Content Strategist
- Product Manager
- Script Writer
- Marketer
- Creative or Digital Agency
Partner Up:
You can’t do everything yourself, and even if you can, those that focus on one aspect of the process will win out.
Bluntly, there are companies out there that can serve your customers better than you can . Yet, this a good thing, find the right partners and you’ll help your customers achieve their goals faster and improve their usage of the service you specialise in.
We’ve outlined a few areas that we think can empower our users / customers to build better experiences whilst allowing us to focus on our core technology.
Custom Bot Design & Development:
Bot-first agencies like BotCube trained and accredited on the Hutoma platform will help facilitate client specific requirements from persona design, script writing, all the way through to implementation. Ensuring brands can deliver a tailored brand-aligned UX to their end users.
Training file Generation & Optimisation:
Deep learning based technologies improve based on the amount of training data available. Crowdflower would enable developers with little to no training data to build training files & everyone else to optimise based on real end user conversations.
Bot building SDKs / Frameworks:
Open Source Frameworks such as BotKit & BotPress have the potential to save developers hours of work. It fits in with the philosophy that led to our marketplace, why build what is already there.
Chat Analytics:
If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it. However, measurement for many is not enough, insights must be delivered in a visual and easy to consume way. This is where BotAnalytics could help our users.
Traffic & Chatbot Marketing
Bot creators need end users in order to make a living, brands need traffic to test bots as part of larger marketing strategy. Chatdynamo are experts at using facebook ads to drive high converting traffic directly to a facebook messenger bot.
(Matthew Clementson is Growth Lead @ Hu:toma AI : an AI chatbot builder & marketplace; Chatbot Summit Berlin Startup Competition Winners)
Join our Private Beta here. We open to the public on August 1st.
