Helpful, engaging, successful and even funny? No, that’s not too much to ask of a chatbot! And it gets even better. If you go about it the right way, it’s actually really easy, too! We show you how to design the perfect chatbot for your company — in just seven steps.
Chatbots don’t have it easy. In fact, people judge them… A LOT. They've been called boring, bad listeners, awkward conversationalists, and, worst of all, useless. To be fair, there are a lot of terrible chatbots out there. However, that’s not their fault because bots are designed by people. So, we have to stop to put all the blame on the bots, and start looking at better ways to design chatbots to make them helpful, engaging, and fun. The good news is: that’s a lot easier than you might think.
You don’t need a specialized IT department to implement a good chatbot for your company, but you do need to put some thought into creating a bot. In our guide, we'll show you how to design the perfect chatbot for your company — in just seven steps.
1. Decide on the purpose of your chatbot
Before you start designing a chatbot, you first have to define why you want to use a bot. Do you have a service that you want to automate, such as making appointments? Or, do you want to use a bot for marketing purposes, and engage more with your customers?
Once you define a goal for the bot, make sure that you also clarify how a bot will help you get there. What is the process in your company now, and where will it be ideally with the help of the bot? This allows you to narrow down the exact role of the bot. Be as clear and as specific as possible because the purpose of the chatbot will be the foundation of everything you create around it.
2. Create concrete use cases for your bot
It’s not enough to define a goal for your bot, you also have to know what your bot will be doing exactly to reach this goal. In other words, what are the tasks that should be completed by your bot? Should it:
- send directions to users?
- update customers on flight information?
- help customers reserve a table at a restaurant?
- send shopping suggestions?
- answer FAQs in customer service?
When first starting out, keep it simple, and make sure everything goes smoothly. You can always build on the foundation you have later. If you're just building your first bot, ready-to-go solutions such as Sinch Engage can be a great start. Here, you can use a drag-and-drop chatbot builder or templates, and design your first chatbot in a few minutes.
3. Choose the channels of interaction
Once you have defined the goals for your bot and the specific use cases, as a third step, choose the channels where your bot will be interacting with your customers.
Are you planning to use the bot on your website, integrate it in your app, use GPT integrations, add it to a messenger app, — or all of the above? Do you want to use GPT integraionsKeep in mind that each channel is different, with varying technical paramete