Conversational experience principles to establish before beginning your chatbot project

Malini
Malini
Aug 24, 2017 · 7 min read

The strategy principles discussed here are particularly relevant for marketing leaders who are looking to harness the power of automated conversational experiences. While chatbots are effective in a number of scenarios, including customer support, we’re primarily exploring brand engagement and other marketing-funnel opportunities here.

The new marketer mindset: the disruptor that marries creativity, data and technology to deliver unforgettable brand experiences to customers at every step of their journey — IBM Global C-suite Study¹

What is an automated conversational experience

This is a bit of a sidebar, for anyone who found this article and is still wondering what conversational experiences are and the role chatbots in them.

Any interaction between a human and software that relies on natural conversations, whether spoken or typed, would be considered an automated conversational experience. Currently these experiences involve devices (e.g. Amazon Alexa-enabled) that can be spoken with, or chatbots (e.g. on Facebook Messenger) that can be texted.

Source: Stackchat²

In the very near future you can imagine this would include interactions with any connected smart-device: telling your car to turn on and turn up heater, messaging it’s GPS what the destination address is, or texting your smart-TV that you’d like to record HBO’s Insecure.

Your conversational strategy

As a forward-thinking chief marketing officer, you have likely spotted that the environment and conditions are perfect for your brand to not just engage customers in messaging spaces like Facebook Messenger, but to use technology to scale to include your entire target audience.

You’re now looking to develop a conversational strategy that will empower your team to explore and implement chatbot opportunities, while remaining aligned to your company and brand goals. Preparing your conversational strategy is also a great excercise for you to think through how this new digital touchpoint is considered within your current martech mix.

I believe a conversational strategy that includes the following four principles will help your marketing managers and experience designers to create experiences that genuinely provide value to both your brand and your customers:

  • How will your conversational strategy align with your existing marketing strategy
  • How will a customer benefit from interacting with your chatbot
  • What is the benefit to your business to be able to engage with customers in their messaging spaces
  • How will the chatbot represent and reinforce your brand’s positioning

How will your conversational strategy align with your existing marketing strategy

Establish the principles that will help your team think about how the behavioural and contextual differences of conversational experiences are distinct from current content and digital marketing practices.

This will help them understand which types of marketing activities are best suited to which environment, and when to harness them in concert in order to present an immersive brand experience.

Traditional digital marketing practices typically rely on widening the marketing funnel:

  • SEM presents your ads to everyone searching for a keyword
  • SMM presents your ads to those who meet your demographic or interest criteria
  • Other ad-driven approaches, including banner ads, are even less specific or effective at helping with your marketing KPIs
  • eDMs may provide more opportunities at increasing content relevancy, but open and click-through rates continue to decrease

Conversational experiences allow you to engage your audience one-to-one, at scale. Traditional digital marketing efforts enable one-to-many shotgunning of your message, in the hopes that some of it will stick. One-to-one conversations, at scale to include your entire audience, means you need to reconsider the principles that influence how you market in this space. You now have opportunity to use automated conversations to tailor the interactions to each customer’s interests and needs.

How will a customer benefit from interacting with your chatbot

In order to frame principles that expresses what value you’d like your customers to benefit from the conversational experience, you’ll need to be clear on:

  • Who will your chatbot will be engaging with
  • Where in their customer journey will the chatbot interaction provide value
  • How will you measure success

Who will your chatbot will be engaging with

Depending on how narrow your brand’s customer-demographics focus is, determine whether the chatbot is targeting all, or a subset, of them.

For instance, if you’re a private health insurance provider you may be operating in all states (e.g. BUPA), with membership available to everyone; alternatively you may be in a just a few states with restricted membership (e.g. Reserve Bank Health Society). You may elect to focus on your entire customer base, or maybe the health fund opts to create a prenatal advice bot that focuses on young families and expecting women.

Define who you’re targeting through the conversational experiences in order to understand how they will benefit from interacting with your chatbot.

Where in their customer journey will the chatbot interaction provide value

Types of conversational opportunities will vary based on who you’re looking to engage, and where in the customer journey they happen to be:

  • Initial consideration of your brand
  • Active evaluation of your product
  • Decision to purchase and
  • Post-purchase exposure

If you have a strong brand, customers may already be including you in their initial consideration set.

For example, Qantas Assure’s health insurance product is a great candidate for using automated conversations strengthen its brand relationships with customers. Their existing wellness program that incentives customers to maintain fitness by rewarding them for their daily step-counts with Qantas frequent flyer points can be extended to a wellness coaching bot. Wellybot can gently remind customers at timely moments to drink more water, go for a walk during lunch, or wind down well before turning in for the day. By becoming a non-salesy trusted presence in customers lives, brands can use automated conversations to strengthen brand relationships and be in the running for initial consideration.

When they’re actively evaluating your brand, you can use automated conversations to understand each individual and present personalised recommendations.

A simple illustration of this are the quote-generating questionnaires offered by many health-insurance providers. A young millennial may be reminded by a parent that their job promotion means they’ll be hit with the Medicare levy surcharge tax if they don’t purchase private health insurance. They can then remain in the Facebook Messenger and engage Medibank to provide family status, state, age, etc information in order to receive a quote.

When the customer is ready to commit to a purchase decision, the conversational experience can seamlessly segue to an onboarding scenario.

Facebook Messenger allows both native payments (for those who’ve saved their credit card information with Facebook) and also in-message checkout webviews. China’s WeChat takes a step further and provides a digital wallet that can be funded from a variety banks and credit card providers.

How will you measure success that you are delivering on your customer-value aims

Based on the value you’re looking to deliver to customers, you’ll be interested in specific sets of success measures. For example when using storytelling scenarios to deepen brand relationships longer durations of chatbot interaction times are positive indicators; whereas for the purchase or onboarding scenarios you likely want to focus on quick conversions.

What is the benefit to your business

Be clear as to which principles steer the commercial gains you’re looking to benefit from with chatbots. Here’s a quick snapshot of the commercial benefits gained from different types of automated conversational experiences:

Source: Stackchat⁴

How will the chatbot represent and reinforce your brand’s positioning

When developing your conversational strategy, you have an opportunity to establish the principles that guide how the chatbot reflects on your brand’s positioning. This is a factor of the chatbot’s name, personality and tone of voice.

Lemonade is an example of a digital-first insurance provider underwritten by Lloyd’s of London. The product values include simplicity (e.g. flat fee), transparency, quick claims processing (as a digital-first company) and social-consciousness. When creating a chatbot for processing customer’s claims, they opted to have it personify their Chief Claims Officer.

Lemonade wanted a chatbot that embodied Jim’s claims handling expertise and calmly empathetic demeanour.

Source: Lemonade⁵

With their AI Jim chatbot, they make it clear to the customer that their chatting with a bot, not Jim himself. AI Jim is introduced, makes it clear his focus is in helping the customer submit their claim. It’s friendly ‘Great to meet you Yael,’ empathises with the customer ‘Sorry to hear that,’ and doesn’t use anodyne corporate-speak ‘Aaaaannnndddd … Boom!’ to express the relief a customer must be feeling at submitting a claim and quickly receiving payment.

Let’s say BUPA health fund released a Facebook Messenger chatbot called BUPA. To start with, the types of automated conversations it supported could be focused on helping customers find a BUPA store based on their location. Additional scenarios can be added over time in order to address everything from receiving a quote, to signing up, to processing a claim.

Alternatively, the Qantas Assure’s health insurance’s Wellybot that we introduced earlier can take a bit of a coach-y tone without diluting Qantas’ or Qantas Assure’s brands.

In conclusion, the four things you should consider for your conversational strategy

Need help developing a conversational strategy, or need clarification as to why it should address:

  • How it aligns with your existing marketing strategy
  • How will a customer benefit from automated conversational experiences
  • What are the business benefits of chatbots
  • How chatbots represent and reinforce your brand’s positioning

You know what to do …

Stackchat

Strong opinions and thoughts on conversational marketing, business, tech and life at a startup. By the makers of Stackchat.

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Thanks to Marcus Robinson

Malini

Written by

Malini

Product strategy nerd. Product delivery geek. Also, breakfast addict. 🥞

Stackchat

Stackchat

Strong opinions and thoughts on conversational marketing, business, tech and life at a startup. By the makers of Stackchat.

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