Designing the way a chatbot converses is called conversation design. It's a combination of technology, psychology, and language that takes into consideration both human and technological limitations and possibilities to create the most intuitive conversational user experience possible. In other words, conversation design is about creating conversations between human and machine that feel as natural as possible.
Designing a chatbot is a step-by-step workflow that conversation designers iterate on.
Some questions to consider before designing a chatbot are:
- Who are your customers? How should they be addressed? What are their needs and pain points while using the bot?
- What are the questions your bot should be able to answer and what are the customer's goals behind them? We call these use cases. For instance, a use case can be ordering food or book a train ticket.
- What is your bot's persona like? To make the experience as pleasant as possible, your chatbot's personality should be consistent and suited to your customer profile.
An important part of conversation design is imagining what interactions with customers will look like and designing your bot to handle different scenarios. The happy flow is the ideal interaction that happens when the conversation goes the way the bot designer expects it to. This means the customer gets what they need without the bot running into any errors or dead ends.
But good conversation design also anticipates and covers potential edge cases. Just like conversations between humans, conversations with a chatbot can jump from one topic to another and customers tend to ask all sorts of things from a bot. So what happens if they start asking questions the bot wasn't designed to answer? How will your bot be able to handle that in the most natural way?
Due to technological limitations, a chatbot will never be able to cover all topics. Therefore, a key point in conversation design is to balance out the bot's use cases (what the bot can talk about) versus the edge cases (topics that are out-of-scope but still need to be handled elegantly).
Note that conversation design is also an iterative process. Once your bot is live, it is important to monitor and update it depending on how your customers interact with it.
Once you have a clear view of how your bot should behave, Engage allows you to build it intuitively and without any coding skills.
