Planning The Best Chatbot

Congratulations you've had that lightbulb moment and you have an idea to create the best chatbot, or maybe you've heard so much about chatbots lately you feel you should explore the idea of using one for your company. If you want to read more about how a chatbot can help your company read our Why using chatbots for business can help you remain competitive blog post

Whatever the reason now it's time to start looking at your idea in more detail to plan the best chatbot..but wait that can be hard. Don't worry, we can help!

Chatbots have progressed rapidly over the past couple of years with advancements in Natural Language Processing (NLP) utilized used across voice and text-driven interfaces. There has never been a better time to start a conversational UI project. However its still vitally important to plan your project carefully.

At The Bot Forge, we like to ask our clients the following questions to ensure we have a clear understanding of what they want to achieve with their chatbot project.

So whether you are looking at creating your own bot, or commissioning a team of chatbot experts like ourselves ;) then it's important to ask yourself the following 10 questions before you start building the best chatbot.

1. What is the purpose of your chatbot?

Why do you want to create a chatbot? What do you want the chatbot to do for your business and how will it achieve your business goals?

Right from the beginning of the project, it? s important for yourself and your team to have a clear understanding of what your chatbot will do

2. What are the key goals of your bot project?

What are the main aims of your conversational ai project? It could be to drive sales, provide 24/7 customer support or engage with new and existing customers by gathering customer feedback and delivering new product information.

3. How will you measure your success

How will you determine the success of your chatbot? What will your Key Performance Indicators (KPI) be?

For example, you could look at click-through rates, the numbers of inquiries handled correctly or feedback statistics gathered.

4. Who is going to use your chatbot?

Have a clear idea about who is going to use your chatbot, what will be the user demographic? This may influence your chatbot's persona.

5. Where will your chatbot be deployed?

Your audience should drive your chatbot platform choice if possible. You can deploy conversational ai assistants to a lot of places:

• Facebook Messenger Chatbot
• WhatsApp Messenger Chatbot
• Telegram Chatbot
• IBM Watson Chatbot
• Slack Chatbot
• Twilio
• Microsoft Teams Chatbot
• Custom Website Chatbot
• IoT

It really all depends on your use case. If it's an internal tool for your HR team then Microsoft Teams makes sense.  Or if you need to help your website users then you can create a website chatbot.

If you can collect information on which platforms your audience use then this can assist your decision. Now is also a good time to consider voice platforms such as Alexa or Google Home.

6. What will your chatbot do?

Here you can really start to consider what sort of functionality the chatbot needs to provide and most importantly the conversations it will be able to support.

A good way to capture chatbot requirements is by looking at them as user stories. The story is in the same format: As a , I want , so that: for example:

- I'm a participant, I want to check what time I can start my event, so that I can be ready to leave in good time.
- As a business, I want to collect customer reviews, so that I can improve their experience.
- As a customer, I want to access my account details quickly and receive an account update through my personal assistant.

7. Will the chatbot have a character?

Will the chatbot have its own persona, will it have a character?
Is the chatbot going to just be a polite assistant or does it need a character to carry through your brand?

8. How will the chatbot create value?

Think about the overall user experience. How will the chatbot ensure that users come back?
For example by providing a simple and well-executed personal assistant then customers are going to use this as their first port of call to find information and/or contact your company.

9. How will people find the chatbot?

How are you going to drive people to find and use your chatbot?
Links on your website and also advertising on Facebook can be great places to start as well as content on your Facebook page.

10. How will you look after your chatbot?

How will you monitor performance after launch? In comparison to other projects, it's important to note that once the chatbot is launched this is just the start of your journey. Essentially you are at the start of the optimization phase. You will need to provide resources to get the most out of your automated assistant after it's gone live.
You will need to monitor user interactions, reactions, unanswered requests: so you can train and improve the overall user experience, training your chatbot is key!

Conclusion

After working through these 10 questions you should be well on your way to understanding your chatbot concept.

With all our new clients at The Bot Forge chatbot agency, we ask them to fill out our chatbot checklist, feel free to download and work through it with other members of your team.

We hope you find this post helpful in getting to grips with your chatbot project, feel free to share if you find the 10 questions useful.

At The Bot Forge, we specialize in conversational AI so why not book a free consultation with us.