Is Your Chatbot Human Enough to Drive Your Brand’s Customer Service?

Chatbots have become a staple of social platforms, mobile apps, and websites. The future of conversational commerce is going to be based on the personality of the chatbots in general.

Why? Because a human-to-human (H2H) approach in marketing is gaining momentum. Higher levels of customization and human-like communication in customer service play an integral role in positioning a brand in the market.

AI-Powered chatbots were developed with the idea of allowing computers to deal with customer service. The idea is to make a conversation seem natural so that users don’t feel that they are talking to a machine.

And that is why we need to add some personality to a chatbot. Your chatbot should resonate with the nature of your business and have a level of human personality that should seem natural within the confines of context.

Let’s give a name to this measuring scale – Chatbot Personality Scale (CPS) – we will use this scale to define how human a chatbot is.

How does it work?

To make things easy, we will evaluate chatbot personalities on a scale of 1 to 10. Here, 1 represents a chatbot that is completely mechanical and has a vanilla personality, and 10 represents a total blabbermouth with a flamboyant personality. It is up to you to choose what level is ideal for your chatbot.

Start by paying attention to your business vertical. If you are an accounting firm, then your chatbot should have a score of 1-2 on CPS. It will barely show any signs of life, just like a real accountant buried in numbers.

Whereas, if you are a hip and trendy online fashion store, you should consider having a chatbot that has different texting patterns and replies. There should be an element of fun in the chatbot responses and the CPS should be around 5-6.

On the other end of the spectrum, where you need to engage audiences to an optimum level, you need a chatbot that has a unique personality and oozes character when interacting with your audience. It should be dramatic, witty and should come across as a storyteller. Here, we are looking at a CPS of 8-9.

Let’s face it, one of the biggest challenges for a chatbot is to make conversations feel natural. It should be seamless, just like a conversation on Facebook messenger or any messaging app for that matter.

Since we humans are terrible at texting ourselves, the way we interact digitally makes it difficult for the chatbots to accomplish this feat.

We often send one single message by breaking it into smaller messages and expect a similar response from the other side. A chatbot tries to answer every single message to the best of its ability almost immediately.

Such small nuances of communication immediately make a customer feel that they are talking to a robot and thus decrease their interest in the conversation.

Yes, it is. Your chatbot should have the ability to analyze when the user is typing. This is a form of intelligent listening and is a must in customer service.

There should be a small gap between the messages received and responses sent. A gap of 3-5 seconds is ideal as it mimics human texting pattern without imposing any responses.

People want to be heard and if your chatbot can listen to what they have to say, it will add tremendously to the user experience.

• Define Context: Build a chatbot with a higher level of AI that will enable it to understand the depth of conversations and become aware of the context to respond to a conversation properly.
• Store Conversations: Give your chatbot the ability to store conversations that it has had with customers in the past. This will make a significant difference when dealing with new customers as the chatbot will be able to personalize conversations and give responses that will make the customer feel special.
• Create a Character: You can break the ice between your brand and the customer by creating a character for your chatbot. Give it a name, add some sense of humor to it, including personality traits that make it feel like an actual person at a store.
• Add Some Wit: Enable your chatbot to have some witty responses in its arsenal that would be triggered under specific situations after understanding the context. Don’t make it too offensive or too nice, remember, you wouldn’t want to talk to a boring person, then why talk to a boring chatbot.

Chatbots are all the rage right now and as we move forward, it will become difficult for brands to stay competitive unless they also adopt new technologies.

The foundation for a successful digital business will be based on enhanced customer experience and here, AI-Powered chatbots will help you spearhead into this new era.

Take hold of your chatbot and it will take care of your customers. Viewer’s perception of your brand will change and with a touch of humanity, your chatbot will help you improve your bottom-line substantially.

To Wrap Up

Be prepared to embrace chatbots and transition your customer service into the hands of your capable digital friends. Chalk down all the points and features you need in your chatbot and decide the CPL score that is accurate for your chatbot.

It is even better if you talk to an expert in the field. Getting advice from a real, live human is a good idea. But don’t worry, I will always be here to help you.

Confused? Well, I am awesome and my CPL is 10, making my natural language processing (NLP) skills the very best. Wouldn’t it be great to have someone like me as the face of your brand?

Give your brand’s digital marketing strategy a much-needed boost today. Contact Us!