What are the traits of a good Chatbot?

In the age of Facebook Messenger, Whatsapp, Slack and AI assistant (Cortana, Siri, Ok Google) we can finally communicate intelligently with our software. With growing Artificial Intelligence, Chatbots are helping us to find products, places, food and even solving customer service issues. Chatbots can convince you of remarkable things like the necessity of clicking a link or they are humans, not robots. Automation using bots allows companies to minimize their costs while still maintaining a high price point, thanks to the ease of use and quality of service.

Brands capitalizing on digital experience are using chatbots to gain competitive advantage. Below are some of the essential qualities the chatbots should have –

Chatbots should make our life easier

Situational awareness is a key feature in Bots. It should respond to user’s minimum amount of input by leveraging stored information and entertain the user’s needs with minimal friction. Bots should be able to automate the daily life tasks for us such as reserving a hotel, ordering grocery, etc. It should save our time and reduce human efforts and pain. Otherwise, it’s not much better than any website or app.

Human-like approach

As discussed in our earlier blog Here’s all that you need to know about Chatbots, there are 2 types of chatbots- rule based chatbots and intelligent AI chatbots who uses machine learning to learn better. No matter with which kind of bot you talk to, there should be anyway more human and personal touch than any other usual app. You should fill it with your company’s personality, brand’s identity or it may speak to your customers like you would. Also, the chatbot message should depend on the input from the user.

The Chatbot should be given human touch in all sense, for example, the user has requested for a good restaurant and the bot can immediately reply from its system but there should human pause in between before answering. This will trick the user into thinking that they are communicating with a person and not just a robot. Similarly, the bot should respond in such a way that customers are bound to believe that they are chatting with a human instead of a bot.

Extended support

Chatbots are here to help us do daily tasks and they should be able to provide required information and do useful actions to provide a continuous positive experience. The help and documentation should be accessible through chatbot itself. Users need not go through other sites and apps for related additional information. The Chatbot should be able to provide all needful information within the messaging app making it a pleasant experience for the users.

Predictive in nature

The Chatbot should always drive the conversation forward. It should consider suggestion things to do like help them discover additional functionality.

“Hey bot, send flowers to my friend.”
“Sure, which flowers would you prefer Roses or Lilies? Would you like to accompany it with a card?”.

You can keep your users/ customers informed about new deals, offers and events through chatbot, giving them relative suggestions to their need. This will also help in the revenue model of the Chatbot company offering extras services. The bot should keep the user updated and help them move forward without burdening them with irrelevant information.

Short and Simple interactions

The conversation with the bot should be short and straight enough, as users are going to use bots from their mobile phones and have very little screen space to look at. The bots should break down the messages into multiple texts like we all do, to give a human touch. Chatbots will make us move from UI full of graphics to a UI of simple texts. Chatbots can store previous conversations, so users don’t need to repeat information. All this will save user’s time and efforts.

Chatbot Personality

When the users chat with the bot they expect straight and clear answers. Users can interact well with a person whom they know and hence the Chatbot needs a personality. So, we need to decide who our chatbot is and from there what matches its identity and actions. Like Facebook’s weather chatbot- “Poncho”, has a persona: knowledgeable, trustworthy and friendly. Adding various versions is also an easy way to add up in personality. Select the communication style that fits your targeted audience and brand image. Chatbots exist in the same space where you would generally interact with a friend in your messaging app. Also if your Chatbot is going to communicate through voice over with your customers then its voice should be matching its defined persona. This will give your customers a pleasant experience of chatting with a bot and getting helped.

Focused Chatbot

Efficient and function-focused chatbots will keep users engaged for a longer period. A chatbot that does a few things right is more useful than one that barely scratch the surface. As natural language processing and machine learning are tough to integrate with chatbots, we are way far from machine understanding human communication completely. So it’s better to build a focused chatbot serving a particular purpose.

Simple UI/UX

Chatbots are usually text-driven, with images and widgets, which makes a smooth start to the interaction with the customer. Simple interface and easy to use features makes a Chatbot effortless to use. Simplicity and easy to use features will make the chatbots to boom in near future. Chatbots will help to move from UI filled with graphics to a UI of simple texts. Eventually, chatbots should bring a hybrid experience of messaging and GUI (Graphic User Interface). By incorporating structured content and images into the conversation, the possibilities of bot interactions open up considerably.