30 Tips To Build Sophisticated, Human-like Chatbots For 10x Business Growth

Which is your favourite brand? How do you remember the brand? For most, it’s customer support. The care you receive after they’ve sold sawdust to the lumbermill, which is relatively easy. It’s not the end of your first sale, it shouldn’t otherwise that’s all you will get. One sale and a one-hit-wonder business. You need to build relationships if one-hit-wonder is not your thing. Relations are built on trust. 

Picture Calvin Klein. For some odd years, anyone that uttered the name set off the image of Justin Bieber. He was the brand ambassador for some time. What’s his role? Make you buy. Brand ambassadors or representatives are appointed by businesses to promote and raise awareness about their products/services. They do so by endorsing, recommending, and referring the company’s services and products to others digitally and otherwise. 

What Calvin Klein tries to sell is more than just the product. It’s a lifestyle choice – something that is either aspired or is lived by Justin Bieber’s fans, synonymous with Klein’s target audience. International and extremely remarkable businesses make an emotional connection with their customers through such cultural undertones. However, with growing content, attention spans shrink and relationships become harder to build. With increasing demands and distractions, how do you get a few minutes of your target audience’s time? Time that is personal. 

It’s not as though Justin Bieber had the time to talk to every customer looking for new pair of jeans. But wouldn’t that be great? Personalization is lacking with brand representatives but the tools to turn it around are with us. Through deep learning, advanced NLU, NLG and a self-learning loop, it’s possible to create an interactive, engaging, human-like, AI-powered virtual brand ambassador who talks with people, each one of them, in a personalised but casual way. That’s different from just advocating for the products online. It’s engaging with customers.

There are many myths about chatbots, particularly one of them being that they’re mere click bots; not possessing the sophistication to hold human-like conversations, but that’s why you’re reading this – because it’s a myth. If you know exactly what you need to do, what your business goal is and the challenges, then it’s easier to define how the chatbot should perform. Then it’s easier to define the level of dialogue sophistication that should occur. 

“The most important decision to make before pursuing a chatbot project surrounds the target level of dialogue sophistication. Executive leaders need to make sure this decision is based not only on what a tool can potentially achieve, but also on ease of time and effort, and level of competence.”

– Magnus Revang, VP Analyst, Gartner

Many CIOs, CMOs, CTOs and other senior executives involved in digital transformation through tools falter in nailing down the issue. A blurry understanding of the issue is only going to give blurry results. 42% of CIO respondents to a survey aren’t fully understanding AI benefits and uses in the workplace, that’s a big problem too. We’ve put together a few tips and tricks to deploy a chatbot that acts as your brand’s ambassador, but better. 

Tips for successful adoption of chatbots and conversational AI

1. Process the current stage of your company and evaluate the business model.
2. In addition, change the model to suit current demands, if needed.
3. Avoid working in silos. Explore a total experience strategy.
4. Data management – ensure the quality, accessibility and scope of your data. 
5. Research and understand AI, its use cases, and what it means for your business.
6. Carefully outline your business objective and challenges. 
7. Decide target use case(s)
8. Risk analysis and security/privacy challenges.
9. Find funds. Pitch your strategy clearly to investors.
10. Evaluate and select a conversational AI vendor – read their resources.
11. Specify your needs – on-premise or cloud deployment.
12. Evaluate the integrations and their complexity.
13. Evaluate the team turnaround and working styles.
14. Ensure upskilling of your team for the deployment.
15. Run demonstrations of the technology.
16. Map the impact of the technology.
17. Measure ROI.
18. Define your brand values, mission, vision, tone of voice, and personality (most brands cover this with a guideline).
19. Build a chatbot persona. This is an extension of your brand and should relate to your target audience.
20. Define use cases and future roadmap.
21. Define the channels you’d like to connect with your customers on (depends on your business model).
22. Check the integration complexity of the conversational AI vendor platform with these apps and your backend systems.
23. Ensure that the chatbot has a good self-learning loop so it can learn from all conversations conducted.
24. Outline edge cases – what are some of the odd things customers can say?
25. Design a conversation flow for all use cases.
26. Provide a fallback loop – handling unknown queries with sophistication.
27. Provide an escalation path – in case the customer requests to speak to a live agent.
28. Build a conversation journey.
29. Build your chatbot and hold rigorous testing.
30. Measure impact and improve continuously. 

Delivering sophisticated human-like conversational experiences to qualify as an ambassador involves – 

• Capacity to hold multi-turn conversations ‌when the user digresses with numerous questions, changing criteria or conditionally adding provisions to their requests.
• Capacity to execute activities in more than one back-end system based on the conversation with the user.
• Capacity to support rich media, rich interactions or micro-applications within messaging channels like Slack or WhatsApp.
• Capacity to support chat and voice with the ability to hold casual conversations where users could repeat a few points or references from the past.

At Yellow.ai, we help our customers build their own sophisticated chatbot on our low-code/ no-code bot builder. Get a demo of the bot builder for your business. Talk to us.