Chatbot has been quite successful in creating a buzz among online businesses in its efforts to take customer experience to the next level. Users have high expectations from Artificial Intelligence (AI) powered chatbot. This entitles businesses to design a chatbot that has the potential to make a customer feel as if they are talking to a human being who understands their language well.
It is a known fact that a lot of programming effort is required to build a fully functional chatbot. However, what many businesses fail to realize is UX designing aspect is equally important. How does your chatbot appear and respond to customer’s queries is what determines its overall usability.
1. Visual Presentation of Chatbot
Users do not like to think of chatbot as a human-machine interface or a robot. For them, it is more like a friend from whom they would like to mint out some useful information. As a result, it is vital to build a human like personality for your chatbot. Visual representation has to match with its attitude and personality.
Some customers are so paranoid that they like playing around with the chatbot by asking silly questions such as ‘how are you’, ‘how’s your day going’, ‘do you have a girlfriend?’ and so on. All such questions should be rightly interpreted by your chatbot to give non-offensive and polite replies that pleases the customer.
2. Teach your Chatbot to Give Short and Simple Replies
Lengthy answers that form paragraph are not good in terms of user readability. Chat replies have to be short, simple and sweet. If your Chabot has to instruct something to user that cannot be conveyed in single sentence, then program it to send series of short replies.
Another option is to use photos and videos to explain something in depth. Android and iOS app development companies understand that using such methods make the conversation more interactive and engaging.
3. Design a Smart Chatbot
You would like your chatbot to ask silly questions to customer, isn’t it? A person using chatbot expects to get quick and precise answer to his or her query, without much cross questioning. AI should be implemented as deeply as possible to understand human behavior.
With AI well incorporated and language interpretation working as expected, your chatbot would develop a smart personality.
4. Escalation System of Chatbot
Chatbot saves human efforts of interacting with customers for basic queries that are most frequently asked. However, you need to have a human supervision to this system as not all answers can be expected from chatbot. How much ever programmed is your chatbot, some level of discussion requires customer interaction with company executives.
To ensure the best UX experience with chatbot, it is necessary to code it such that it understands when to escalate the case to higher authority executive. This way, customer’s high level issues can be addressed immediately without any delay.
Conclusion
Once your chatbot is ready, test it by indulging in conversational chat with a set of random people. Keep an eye on the responses delivered by chatbot and reaction of the opposite person. Some aspects that you missed out on might come to light during this testing phase.
It is not too late to work on flaws at this stage though. This testing and analysis will help you to refine the UX experience before the product is deployed in the online world to millions of people.