Five Top Tips
As with any new technology, chatbots require an appropriate strategy for seamless integration and deployment. Here are our top five tips around forming a great chatbot strategy, whatever your organization!
- Align Chatbot Strategy with Business Objectives
Clearly define the business goals here. Chatbots are beautifully placed to enhance customer experiences and efficiency in the same breath, but you need to be really clear in your own mind how chat marketing will be at the service of your organization’s goals (and not the other way around).
Aligning chatbot strategy with your business objectives is your starting point.
- Get Bot-Ready
Corporate technology has really shifted to enable flexibility, with companies understanding that rapid change is inevitable and that being able to adapt to the smartest new technologies that customers love is now the name of the game.
Equally, the way customers use bots is an unfolding experience – so built-in flexibility to accommodate different platforms and devices, including ones that may not yet exist, is essential.
Other elements of your bot-ready checklist could include:
- People
It’s still humans that input chatbots’ knowledge base. In fact, we should all regard the world of chatbots as an area of really progressive human-AI collaboration.
- Information
Customer account histories, product specifications and many other types of key data will currently be stored in different systems and platforms, but it needs to be mobilized if you’re to offer fully optimized customer service via chatbots.
- Security
Chatbots will be handling potentially sensitive customer data, so you need to ensure all the appropriate boxes are ticked in this respect.
- Balance Investment and RoI
‘Where’s the RoI?’, your colleagues and board members will ask, so be ready to answer it deftly!
The cost savings and customer experience benefits of chatbots are so obvious, it’s surprisingly easy to neglect to back up your strategy with properly crunched numbers.
Remember, too, that as far as chatbots are concerned, RoI isn’t always immediate. Think long-term; chatbots really help cement your customers’ relationships with your brand, and the true yield can start to be evident after several financial quarters rather than in the first.
- Integrate Your Bot Strategy Across Devices
Make sure your chatbot is integrated across a wide range of customer devices, leveraging your current tech investments and extending them to as broad a customer audience as possible.
Chatbots are by far the most efficient way of putting your organization’s knowledge base to work, but this needs to be made as easy as possible for your customers so they can find what they’re looking for, regardless of the device or channel they’re using.
- Communicate Effectively to the Board
Senior executives will want the full low-downon exactly how chatbots can help the organization, and in what sort of time frame.
But you also need to be aware of the barriers that some managers may have. Top of the list is a fear that users would be reluctant to engage with a bot – but they may also be worried about privacy and security, regulations and platform fragmentation among others.
Senior managers will also want to know what competitors are doing in this area. If competitors slow to harness the potential of chat marketing, communicate to your management colleagues how your organization can steal a march this way.
Finally, it’s a good idea to schedule a live demo for board members – sometimes, people need to see the technology in action to understand its benefits. Seeing other businesses – including competitors! – employing chatbots effectively in real time can be a persuasive exercise too.
