The Secret to a Successful Chatbot Strategy

The benefits of AI chatbots are clear: they can operate outside of business hours, extend customer interactions beyond your website to the likes of social media and messaging platforms, and provide cost savings whilst also improving operational efficiency.

However, they’re not magic. Technologies based on machine learning, especially, require a well thought out strategy. Your chatbot implementation strategy needs to go through a number of business steps in order to ensure the final conversational AI delivers the intended results.

Effective chatbot strategies have a lot of steps. Whilst simply plugging in a pre-build chatbot might meet basic needs for optimizing customer service costs, it only touches the surface of what chatbot technology can offer. To better meet your own business goals and those of your target audience, you should consider a more in-depth chatbot strategy.

What Do the Best Chatbot Strategies Have in Common?

Your chatbot strategy is essentially like any other strategy in your organization: it should have its own business goals, or tie directly into other established objectives, and then have key elements designed to ensure that. In other words, “implement chatbot technology” is not a goal on its own.

Any successful chatbot strategy should have, at some level, the following elements:

• Defined goals and objectives: When planning chatbot implementations, you need an intended outcome. What will it achieve? How will you measure it? These should be decided before you even built your first chatbot prototype.
• An understanding of the customer journey: Alongside understanding your customer personas and audience segments, you should create customer journey maps – if you don’t have them already. Specifically, you need these customer journey maps to understand where your chatbot interactions sit in the wider process.
• A user-centric design: A successful chatbot should do more than just meet customer expectations. It should provide a superior customer experience through relevant responses, considerate UI, optimization at every channel and more. Identify touchpoints and optimize them – the right solution for the right platform.
• Metrics and performance monitoring: Your chatbot strategy doesn’t stop once it’s live. Your business needs to keep an eye on key metrics, evaluate overall chatbot performance and adapt as necessary.
• User feedback: A chatbot’s success depends on its usability in the eyes of its intended users. Therefore, the best chatbot strategies will regularly analyse user feedback and customer data to ensure the bot is best meeting the needs – and wants 😉 – of their target audience.

Next, we’ll go over each of these aspects of your chatbot strategy in more detail, giving you some key pointers on what to include.

Defined Goals and Objectives

Every business needs business objectives. Likewise, virtually every action the organization takes should then play in to one of those business goals. Chatbot platforms are no exception. Defining your goals and expectations here will inform so much of your chatbot strategy. For example, at least some of the ‘bot metrics that you choose should indicate progress towards these business goals.

Some example objectives can include:

• Improving customer satisfaction: Even though users could find basic information on an FAQ page, when implemented correctly, bot responses can reach more channels, give the company a more friendly face and generally improve customer sentiment. This in turn increases brand loyalty and perception.
• Increasing sales and conversions: Alternatively, you might want your chatbot to better encourage sales – either directly or through upselling  / cross-selling – and encourage them through the sales funnel.
• Greater cost savings: In areas like customer support, for example, you might want a chatbot platform to take care of the most repetitive tasks and customer concerns, so that every human agent can focus on the more critical and complex inquiries.
• Improving customer engagement: When it comes to instant messaging platforms and social media, your business is often available, but not engaging. Chatbot’s are the right technology for integrating into the likes of Facebook messenger, helping to reach a wider audience and increase overall customer interactions.

What you want to achieve will depend very much on your business. To give an industry specific example, the healthcare sector can make great use of bots to operate around the clock, supporting patients in getting to the specialists they need. However, it would be unwise to have a chatbot strategy based on upselling, where as a retail company could do the exact opposite. Conversational AI can help improve sales in the likes of fashion, whilst also helping customers in area such as furniture, where users are more infrequent, but the potential benefits per sale are higher.

Similarly, it’s also important to think of your chatbot implementation strategy not only externally, but also internally. Some goals, such as saving time and money, may best be achieved by enabling chatbots internally. We can draw on the multiexperience approach here, taking a thorough look at every channel and business need.

Understanding the Customer Journey

Whether B2B or B2C, customer journey mapping is an essential best practice. It’s important to know where your target audience is, how they first come to you (and why) and how they eventually convert into valuable customers.

More specifically, you need to identify customer touchpoints. So many businesses have multiple communication channels, and successful customer experiences utilize these to their fullest. In your research, you’ll likely identify messaging platforms, website activity and more information. You’ll know how and where the user interacts with your brand. For the best chatbot success, you should implement your new solution inline with these touchpoints.

In particular, you need to find the pivotal moments where chatbots can most effectively support users towards the next step*. You may also find that this varies with different segments, or perhaps even different regions.

*Note that we said the next step, not the final step. Your chatbot will have more successful conversations if you move at the user’s own pace, and go through the journey map, rather than trying to hard-sell.

User-Centric Designs

Even if your chatbot’s responses are perfect, users won’t use your chatbot if the design is terrible. When it comes to any digital solution, basic design influences so much. Once you know what channels you want to include to include, you should let your designers get to work!

Good UX not only improves customer satisfaction, it improves their likelihood if using the chatbot more, which in turn leads to longer, more frequent and better customer engagement.

And let’s also not forget the range of potential communication channels at your disposal. Today’s users have multiple devices, some of which have multiple channels all of their own. These may all have unique considerations that your designs should take into account.

For example, even at a glance, you can tell that a laptop and smartphone have different screens, controls and dimension, so you should adapt accordingly. But even then, there are differences between chatbots built into the likes of Facebook Messenger, and those native to your site. And that’s just the tip of the omnichannel iceberg.

Metrics & Performance Monitoring

If you have your business goals determined, then you can start adding the best bot metrics to both monitor progress, as well as overall chatbot performance. The most effective chatbot strategy is one that regularly reviews and updates for continuous improvement.

We’ve previously written a whole guide to chatbot analytics and which metrics to measure, so we won’t go into too much detail here. Just know that you need a few dials to keep your ‘bot performance progressing as intended.

Incorporating User Feedback

Whilst on the topic of metrics and things to do once your chatbot platform is live, you should also strive to incorporate user feedback into this review and improvement loop. After all, it’s only real users that can tell you if you’re providing a successful customer experience.

In our previous topic on chatbot best practices, we mentioned the critical role of customer feedback and how your chatbot should actively seek to acquire this feedback. Well, this is the second part to that. How you respond to feedback is just as important.

If your chatbot isn’t sending appropriate responses, your users will immediately give negative feedback. In turn, this gives you a clear indicator of potential improvements. Likewise, if you notice that the most negative sentiments coincide with the longest customer conversations, that’s another potential indicator. Be smart with your data, and look into overlaps.

And one more thing – if you really want to increase customer satisfaction, why wait until the chatbot is fully live to start collecting this data? 😉 Even during the late stages of chatbot implementation, you can consider in-house testing, as well as a small beta release to a select audience, to get immediate user feedback.

Chatbot Strategy Process

Now that we’ve covered the individual elements of a successful chatbot strategy, how do we convert it into a process that’s easy to follow?

Again, we could say that every business is different etc etc… but most effective strategies follow a similar process. We can split into both pre-implementation and post-implementation.

Before Chatbot Implementation

Pre-implementation is unique. This is when you need to do the most research. Deep dive in your market segments, your customer expectations, key channels of engagement and where the biggest improvements stand to be made. Then build, test and refine your new artificial intelligence chatbot around these outcomes.

We can think of this in a few key stages:

• Research & Discuss: Research, plan and agree on your business goals and objectives. Determine where the chatbot will sit, both in terms of channels and customer touchpoints. This is also where you should include views and information from additional teams. For example, if you’re looking to meet customer expectations regarding trouble-shooting, you should be working directly with your customer service teams.
• Refine: The more you try to include at the start, the longer it will take. Focus on the core essentials for ensuring smooth and effective chatbot interactions. Other “nice to haves” can be implemented later.
• Build & Prototype: Develop your first chatbot prototype to meet the immediate needs. Build the MVP on training data and work on smoothly implementing it on your various channels. This is where good design and UX is essential.
• Test: Don’t launch without testing! Simulate customer engagement, or even consider a limited release. Take this valuable feedback and adjust your chatbot accordingly.
• Launch: Obviously, at some point you need to launch your new chatbot! Just make sure you’ve gone through all the previous steps first.

After Chatbot Implementation

In comparison to the pre-implementation chatbot strategy, we can summarise the post-launch process as:

• Research & Discuss: This time, you should look into your chosen metrics and find where potential improvements could be made.
• Refine: You probably won’t be able to do everything all at once, so it’s critical to know where the most important actions need to be taken. Your metrics and goals can help inform this.
• Build & Prototype: Next, you need to tweak your data, the artificial intelligence or other corresponding changes in the chatbot platform based on the previous steps. In the majority of cases, you don’t want to do this straight on the live versions, that’s because…
• Test: It’s always better to test changes before launching them. This can ensure you accurate and consistent responses whilst still providing a positive customer experience to your target audience. You can both test in house[PK2] , and through a selected audience via A/B testing.
• Launch: Once you’re sure these changes are working as intended, you can fully launch.
• Monitor: After releasing the update, you can go back to monitoring chatbot analytics – and of course, analyse user feedback after the implemented changes.
• Research & Discuss: Given some time, you can then repeat the process. What else needs to be improved? Or are there new ways to increase customer engagement?

As you can see, this is an endless cycle of constant improvement. While this might seem like an endless chatbot implementation, you should think about it as more of a constantly improving customer experience! And if customer satisfaction matters in your business, it’s hard to argue with that 😉

An Effective Chatbot Strategy Takes Effort… But It’s Worth It!

If you’re just starting your chatbot strategy, the above criteria will for sure help you. Whether you want to optimize customer service costs, increase leads or otherwise improve brand loyalty with more meaningful customer engagement, the above steps and processes will ensure you never lose sight of your business goals.

And if you have any questions, our absolutely 100% human agents are only an email away!