How do you design an effective chatbot?

March 28, 2024

Today, chatbots are allies that businesses can't do without. They help them on all fronts of the business, especially in customer management. Companies that make use of them can easily achieve high sales figures thanks to the automation of certain tasks and their marketing systems generated by the tool. But before you can benefit from all these advantages, you need to have a good one. How do you go about creating the best chatbot for your business?

Define objectives and identify needs

Creating a good chatbot necessarily starts with defining the main objectives and identifying the needs to be met. 

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Defining objectives

There are more than one chatbot in existence today, and they don't necessarily all have the same personality, let alone the same objectives. You can find more information here. Of course, the ideal is to have a creative technological tool that is capable of innovating and adapting to the situations it will encounter once it has been created. But that's not enough, because you need to specify the objectives you want it to achieve. To help, it is advisable to prioritise them.
A company that wants a chatbot in its customer service is looking to automate the answers to certain commonly asked questions. But if its aim is to direct cyber consumers towards the best products, it should opt for a configurator or product selector. In reality, you first need to know what your objective is before deciding which chatbot to create. Then you need to define your requirements.

Identifying needs

This is one of the most important steps in designing a chatbot for your business. If the needs are poorly identified, there's a greater chance that the chatbot won't satisfy customers, and won't move its user. In fact, you need to ask yourself what the user is likely to be looking for once on the platform.
You also need to be interested in how they are going to do their research, and how you can make their task easier. It's the answers to these practical questions that will enable you to define the scope of your future chatbot.

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Setting up conversational scenarios

This stage is linked to customer needs. It will be complex if these needs are not well determined. This is why experts recommend spending as much time as possible on identifying customer needs. In fact, the stage of defining conversational scenarios is based on the analysis of internal data. All possible requests and responses then need to be parameterised in the artificial intelligence.

This configuration stage enables the chatbot to provide direct and precise responses to requests. For example, for a simple greeting, it might respond with "Hi, I'm fine, thanks. What about you? This also enables it to quickly collect data on each customer who is likely to come back with other concerns. For example, if Jérôme had already contacted him for an answer and is coming back, he can start the discussion with "Hi Jérôme, nice to see you again!

You also need to define the tone of the discussion, but not with the aim of making the customer think they are talking to a human being. The aim is to make the conversation as natural as possible. To achieve this, the tone must be congruent with the company's identity. If there's one criterion for identifying a chatbot, it's its tone. That's how you'll come across chatbots that are on first-name terms with their customers, while other companies opt for the polite form of address.

Once this stage has been completed, the chatbot needs to be tested before it becomes operational. Like a newborn child, it has to learn. This learning stage is called "bot training". During this phase, you need to teach the bot the different directions a discussion can take. When all is said and done, the chatbot will only become better once it starts interacting with customers. It will improve as it goes along.

In conclusion, respecting these different stages guarantees the birth of an effective and satisfying chatbot. Now it's its development that will determine the relevance of its responses to customer requests.