6 things we learned for building better chatbots during Superbot conference last week!
Last week I visited the Superbot conference in San Francisco. The conference is primary for AI, chatbots and Virtual Assistants. In this blog, I will summarize 6 key lessons for building better and more engaging chatbots that were heavily promoted throughout the conference.
Lesson 1: Analytics
The keynote was focused around the rising importance of analytics for chatbots. Finding out the gender of your users, what they are interested in and last but not least what value your bot is providing for them were the main metrics being tracked today. Bot analytics can help you to increase user acquisition and discovery, understand how user interact with your bot, define your monetization strategy, improve your conversation flow and response effectiveness.
Lesson 2: User acquisition and discovery
Bot discovery, introduced by Facebook at F8 last month, was also heavily promoted. It’s something like Viber public accounts, place where you can promote and announce your bot. Also you can create a video with most influencing users of your bot and promote platforms as Youtube.com for example.
Lesson 3: Monetization
In my opinion, this is the hottest topic in building conversational UI application, but also the least understood yet. A lot of people try to monetize bots in same way as mobile applications, but they realize that users are going away. The ads must be personalized and experienced bot developers use predictive analytics to send targeted ads to users.
Lesson 4: UX and engagement
Many bot developer are failing in the trap of generalizing the bots that they develop across channels. Even for different channels, the bot must look and behave in the different ways. Also, it’s always a good idea to create bots that can process more than one message at a time by waiting for the user to finish even if he sends you multiple messages. This simulates real-life conversation which is more closer to how we write and communicate in social media.
Lesson 5: Big brand bot strategy
What I liked most from this session was that the bot must be focused on simple tasks. Create a conversation for one on one relationship with the client and don’t push ads to the customers. Following those best practices will provide real value for the customer and monetization will come later on its on.
Lesson 6: The age of voice
Voice assistance will be the next wave in platform development. A lot of enterprises will create their own virtual assistant which will be used as rookie guides, answering FAQ, automate common HR work and etc. In the upcoming years we will be able to easily build Jarvis (Iron Man virtual assistants) much easier than today. But for now, unless you have a very clear advantage of using voice, the majority of use cases and users prefer text-based chatbots.
Summary
Now is the time to create chatbots that solves repetitive and hard business processes. By investing in chatbots, you can concentrate your effort on creating customer value and not worry about deployment, complex user experience, and app store approvals.
That is the reason we are creating Darvin.ai.
