4 Ways To Improve User Experience
We all know that one of the most attractive functions of a chatbot is to provide us with transactional conversations, both faster than email and with more people than phone calls. When the number of sales goes up and the time it takes us to make them goes down, everyone is happy, and that’s why chatbots are here to stay.
However, a chatbot built solely to be transactional can leave plenty of money on the table, mostly in the the lifetime value of a customer. Loyalty programmes and gamification has been a great way of improving this user experience (often shortened to UX) but I like teaching my students to go further and decorate their flows and making the conversations more enjoyable for the user.
Here are four of the tips I have for this:
Understand and Anticipate User Needs:
The first step in optimising a chatbot's UX is to thoroughly understand your users' needs and expectations. This is super easy if you are working with a client who’s team has logged thousands of sales calls and you can simply grab their scripts and get started. If you are starting from scratch, this means setting aside time over the next months until your chatbot receives at least a hundred user inputs you haven’t anticipated.
Analyse these common questions and concerns addressed by your customers. Leverage this data to anticipate questions and provide relevant, timely responses. A well-informed chatbot can guide users efficiently through their journey through buttons, offering solutions or ideas even before they are explicitly requested. If you nail this, you’ve made the biggest shift towards a chatbot people love to engage with.
Personalisation is Key:
Personalisation can significantly enhance the user experience. Tailor the conversation flow to include user data like answers to past questions (saved to and recalled from User Fields), preferences, and purchase history. Do this at every possible opportunity without being obnoxious, and find a natural pace at least every two flows to mention the user’s name, because our name is our favourite word in our language.
A chatbot that remembers and mentions a user’s previous choices or preferences can offer a more human-like interaction, making the user feel valued and understood. Simple gestures like addressing users by their name can create a more engaging and personalised experience. This is timeless, and you can learn more about how to apply this in the centennial book “How to Make Friends and Influence People” by Dale Carnegie
Simplify and Optimise Conversational Flow:
A great chatbot should communicate effectively and naturally. Ensure the conversational flow is logical, concise, and jargon-free. Users should feel like they are having a conversation with a knowledgeable friend rather than navigating a complex system. You can run your texts through a reading comprehension platform online to optimise the language.
Implementing buttons or quick replies for the most expected answer to a question, or leading to the anticipated next step, will streamline the conversation and make it more user-friendly. One of the rules I teach, and my team uses it with clients, is to make sure that the outcome both you and your user want to arrive to is no more than 3 clicks from where they opted in.
For example, if you make a post on IG about a webinar, and they drop a comment that triggers a flow, your buttons on the first message after the double opt-in should say “sign up here” but also “I want to learn more”. If they click the second, which helps improve conversion on the sign up, the next set of buttons absolutely must include the sign up button. This helps them stay focused and keeps the high-value action you’re after within 3 clicks, which fits in most people’s terrible attention span.
Continuous Learning and Improvement:
Finally, the best chatbots are those that evolve. Regularly review chat logs in the Live Chat area to identify areas of confusion or frustration. User feedback is invaluable; consider integrating a quick feedback flow at the end of interactions to gather direct user insights.
If you don’t have someone who can monitor the Live Chat area, or you can’t you can explore setting up an integration with GPT that helps parse and log the points of contention on a G-Sheet that you’ve integrated. If you aren’t feeling confident about GPT integrations yet, you can just log the user input and have the bot notify you so you can hop in yourself to clear it up. Don’t forget to use keywords and alter the text in your flows to match the solutions you and your user found together.
All this to say enhancing user experience in chatbots is not just about leveraging advanced technologies to make the green, the dough, the hard cash; it’s about creating an empathetic, user-centric conversation flow that resonates with your audience. Oh, and don’t forget to track anything that indicates their behavioural inclinations! By understanding and anticipating user needs, personalising interactions, simplifying conversational flows, and continuously learning and improving, you can ensure that your chatbot not only meets but exceeds user expectations.
I hope this was useful, let me know in the comments if you have any questions! Also, share your own tips, the better we all get the better our chatbots perform!
