5 Mistakes to Avoid while developing your conversational chatbot
Building and launching your conversational chatbot is like adding a new wing to your business. There are loads of preparation and strategies that ranges from researching your customer requirements to prepare the best conversational design flow. The chatbot also needs to be developed error-free that keenly follows your designed conversational flow and handle commonly used phrases at the same time.
But that isn’t as easy as it may sound. With many unnoticed errors and wrong steps taken during the design and development process, it can be challenging to achieve a successful conversational chatbot.
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However, if you are aware of potential mistakes during the development stage then you can avoid them. Here are five common mistakes to look out for in the process of developing a successful and customer friendly conversational chatbot.
1. Poor Planning
When you are developing a chatbot it is necessary to plan the roadmap and set goals you want to achieve well before the development stage. It’s always better to develop a chatbot that initially handles basic problems and then in later phases, it can be extended further to handle bigger problems. Breaking your bigger goal into smaller goals and plan the flow accordingly is very much needed.
Your chatbot should also be strategised in making decisions based on your customers’ responses. With natural language processing and sentiment analysis, the chatbots should be able to predict the conversation that needs to be made which would take the conversation in a better direction. This results in chatbot getting more personalised and avoid customers in developing a negative mindset towards your business.
2. Insufficient testing
Chatbot testing is different from web and app testing which runs in a predefined way, whereas chatbot needs to be tested for uncommon scenarios as well.
A bad first-impression of your brand’s chatbot can ruin the goodwill that has been earned in the past with a lot of your dollars. When your poorly tested chatbot interacts with your customers, the possibilities of it performing as per your expectations are obsolete. The problem can occur when your chatbot faces bugs that either affect its response flow or makes it totally unresponsive.
To avoid such things to happen before going live, always make sure to test your chatbot several times. The best way is to test it in a closed beta group where selected customers can test your bot and give feedback based on their experiences. With their feedback, you can further improve the service and eliminate any error that occurred, before you make it available live for your customers.
3. Not updating your chatbot regularly
This will be the biggest mistake if you think that launching a properly tested chatbot will end your development. Although conversational chatbots learn from constant interactions and improve their performance to give better responses, an analyst has to be assigned to monitor its performance and decide necessary changes which needs to be done.
4. Avoid giving bland personality
Take a minute to recall some of the famous chatbots you have known or interacted with in the past.
You may remember those bots either by their personality and how well it resonated with the brand it was representing. Giving a brand personality to your chatbot is really important that resonates with your brand while interacting with your customers.
Customers tend to get bored interacting with a bot that takes forward conversation plainly without any customer-friendly engagement. A chatbot infused with a personality that speaks your brand language can make it enjoyable as well as informative. You can think of some corporate humour in your business that connects well with your customers, thus personalising the whole interaction with customers.
5. No Analysis Mechanism
Like many other customer-centric channels it is equally important to measure your chatbot performance for better understanding the value your chatbot is adding to your business. Always make sure to use some existing analytics tool or develop your custom analytics.
There are many important parameters you can analyse from your chatbot like activation rate, retention rate, response rate, number of active users and number of daily users that can help you in improving its performance. The chatbot KPI’s will help you in the process of improving the chatbot interaction with your customers.
CONCLUSION
Your business is not defined by you but by your customers. When you are exposing your conversational chatbot in front of the customers, you need to make sure that it works towards improving the overall customer experience. Keep these common yet important mistakes checked before you launch your chatbot. You are sure to get better results with your chatbot.
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