Best UX practices for Chatbots
How to make Chatbots useful and usable for businesses? How to make sure that Chatbots can give a great user experience to the users?
The art of creating a user-friendly Chatbot lies in a great User Experience for the chatbot users. Today, Chatbots have become important for businesses that have an online presence and want to engage the audience. Now, Conversational AI is a word used for chatbots that engage with the audience in a conversational style imitating how a human agent would interact with the website visitors. In this blog, we will talk about the best UX practices for chatbots and help the businesses in engaging the website visitors comfortably. Great user experience for the visitors would lead to a far more greater chance of them returning back to the website and increasing chances of user retention.
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Best UX Practises for Chatbots:
Easy to understand Chatbot UI
Easy to use functionality is an art in itself that boosts your chatbot likeability and usefulness. Customers don’t want to spend their time learning how to use the chatbot UI elements if they are trying to book a service or doing a payment or appointment booking.
In the below one, it’s convenient for the user to select the date from the calendar rather than typing the dates. Users might get confused on how to write the dates- is it DDMMYYYY or MMDDYYYY.
In the above conversation, the chatbot gives the options for the visitors to select the date.
The visitor can easily select the date from the calendar.
Increase wait time between messages
Consumers prefer to interact and engage with the chatbot at their own pace without information overload. UX developers need to take in to the point that the website visitors ask chatbots for instant information and would take time to process the same when delivered. User experience is different for every customer, some would like to read fast and some would want more gap between messages.
In our understanding of dealing with customers across different verticals, we have observed that 2–3 seconds wait is an optimum one. The continuous flow of messages from the bots would distract the user and he/she won’t be able to process the information.
Chatbot Dialogue aligned with the Target audience
If a Chatbot is created for Fintech operations such as opening bank account, MF inquiry, insurance inquiry, it doesn’t make sense to inject humor or playfulness or use of emoji. You can make chatbot lively if it’s dealing with travel or e-commerce website visitors. Use a sense of humor effectively and selectively to enrich the conversation and not just for the sake of it.
Below is a Chatbot for a Hotel Booking, Use of Emojis is adept.
Below one is a credit card recommendation one! To the point!
The chatbot is NLP based
NLP based chatbot can understand the customer query written in their natural language and answer them immediately.
NLP and other machine learning technologies are making chatbots effective in doing the majority of conversations easily without human assistance.
There would be no need to download any web or mobile application or browse through the website for information. Users would get all the information without any hassle by just asking the chatbot in their natural language and chatbot interprets it perfectly with an accurate answer.
Offer user variety of input options
Consumer behavior is a much-discussed aspect of the world of user experience. Predicting customer reaction with a chatbot is often a risky prospect for UX developers but we can minimize a customer hassle in engaging with a chatbot by offering him options.
Users can interact by typing text in the text box or by selecting one of the options available in the chatbot. Some people might prefer to select the option provided instead of writing a long text. Some would prefer to elucidate their inquiry in the form of a text. By giving options, visitors can interact better with the chatbot and the chances of engagement are much more possible.
User isn’t left unanswered
Customers often call up customer care centers and end up getting irritated with the wait-time or hang-ups. So, when the customer pings a chatbot for information, he/she expects a swift answer. Chatbots needs to be swift in answering the question without any delay. If chatbot shows it’s answering, the customer feels satisfied and won’t leave the conversation. Retention of customers won’t be difficult if the chatbot engages with the customer and answers their queries effectively & swiftly. In case, the chatbot fails to understand the customer query, it will pass on the query to human agents and help resolve the customer queries instantly.
Chatbots designed based on UX principles are advantageous businesswise as well, since they are capable of complementing human labor in certain ways. In addition, they can help in a better resource distribution leading to a decrease in costs.
