What are the best practices for your bot?
Here you will learn some best practices for developing a bot.
Estimated Reading Time: 02 minutes
Why use a Chatbot?
Whatever the purpose and scope of the bot, a chat is a communication channel and people will always use it to ask anything about your product or service. Responding quickly or redirecting them to the right channel will improve their experience with your company.
It is recommended that the bot can understand as many user intentions as possible and can answer them even, if it does not have a specific answer.
What is the purpose of the bot?
The purpose of the bot needs to be clear to you as well to your users. What is your field of expertise? What is your main purpose? That needs to be clear starting with the initial message and in the root menu options. The bot needs to be an expert in its field, even if it knows nothing about other subjects.
This places an expectation on users about topics that can be discussed and what are the rules of engagement with the bot to avoid frustration.
What is the tone of voice?
The tone of voice is the persona or narrative that the bot will have. It requires consistency in the tone used across responses. It should also be similar to the voice the company has in other communication channels.
- Will the answers be in the first or third person? Is it formal or informal?
- Should it use emojis?
- Will it represent a person? Is it female or male?
- Is the representation of the bot a virtual assistant? a brand? a pet?
We recommend presenting the bot as a virtual assistant and as part of a team. We do not recommend pretending the bot is human to users.
Suggest related information
After each response, the bot always give additional information to users related to their last call. You can do it with various tools in the platform. As a best practice, the bot should never end with a simple response. It needs to end either offering new options, related topcis or asking a question.
Conversational response format
The bot should always answer with written content in a conversational format, i.e., responses should preferably be short so that they can be read on a mobile screen, without the need for scrolling.
Comprehensive answers
To multiply the universe of questions that can be answered with the same response, it is vital to be written comprehensively. The response should not be closed or too specific.
It is a good practice to avoid the answers beginning with “Yes” or “No,” as these would be very restrictive and might not apply to the variety of ways a user asks the same request.
The user needs to perceive that the bot understands their question
When writing an answer, it should be clear that the bot understands the question and is answering correctly.
For example, for the question “What is the hourly price for parking?”, the answer should be: “Parking costs $25 per hour” instead of “$25 per hour.”
Request for user information
When asking users for information to complete a request, share first the reason for collecting that information and how you plan to use it. In addition to complying with local or international regulations for collecting data, you will increase the chances of getting a response back to complete the request.