It's that time of the year again, when everyone's talking about New Year's resolutions! Everyone's in the mood to look back through the previous year and become better versions of themselves in the coming year.
But why stop there? This is a great time to also set new goals for your business and your chatbot. Don't forget that your chatbot is a part of your team--and they need goals to grow, too!
Check out our top three chatbot resolutions:
Be Friendlier
Many times, chatbots are too robotic for many people's tastes. While it's okay if it's obvious your customer is talking to a chatbot, a friendlier chatbot is sure to make people feel more at ease. Think about this: your chatbot is the face of your brand. Are you okay with your brand feeling like a robot?
Here are a few tips on how your chatbot can be friendlier:
- Change your chatbot's language to mimic how your customers talk. Look through conversation histories to get a feel for the kind of words and phrasing your customers use.
- Use Natural Language Processing (NLP) to recognize real language and adapt to the customer's tone. If you can't use NLP, try using trigger keywords and phrases within conversations. For example, if your customer starts sending "hello???", perhaps send an apologetic GIF and an offer to switch them to a human customer service staff.
- At the end of a significant conversation, have your chatbot ask your customer how they feel. This is a great time to get great feedback as well as improve on any errors your chatbot may have committed during the conversation.
Be More Mindful
Chatbots may not have a brain, but they do have access to a lot of data, if you let them. Even if your business requires human agents to address your customers, chatbots can help collect important data even before your human staff gets on the case.
This way, once your staff gets in touch with the customer, they have much more information about their customer than starting the conversation from scratch.
Other than collecting information, your chatbot can offer up solutions to your customers even before they ask. Take a look at these possible scenarios:
- When a current customer chats up your chatbot while they have an order within the shipping or delivery timeline, it's possible they're messaging to inquire about their order. Start off strong by asking them if they're inquiring after their order, and send them information even before they ask.
- If your customer orders the same thing on a regular basis, offer to pre-fill their shopping cart with their previous order. You can save them a significant number of clicks this way, and show them that you care!
- If you never hear from a customer after the delivery timeframe is over, why not automatically chat them up to check in how they enjoyed their order? This can help solidify customer relationships and encourage loyalty and return purchases.
Stay Focused
It's easy to fall into the trap of making your chatbot do everything. After all, they're so versatile that they can do it!
However, while chatbots might not get overwhelmed with all the things they need to do, we humans overseeing the chatbot's work can get overwhelmed ourselves. If we don't focus the chatbot on a specific aspect of our business, especially when we start using chatbots, we might lose out on quick ROI that will allow us to grow even faster.
Think about what your target market and potential customers want to see from your chatbot. If you can combine this with what will have the most positive impact on your business, the chance for chatbot success is even higher.
If your customers chat you up mostly to order, an order-taking chatbot can help a lot. Focus on improving the order flow to make it a breezy transaction every time, and get more returning customers!
If you have special items that your customers need technical or other support on, a chatbot to address concerns and quickly deal with issues may be what you need the most. If your chatbot can keep your customers happy throughout this process, you can look forward to more loyal customers!
Conclusion
These resolutions are common for us humans, but chatbots can use them too. A friendlier, mindful, and focused chatbot can be very good for your business, regardless of your industry.
Use the new year to take a deeper look into your chatbot and set new goals. Let's hit 2021 out of the park.