The Guide to Writing Perfect Chatbot Scripts
In 2019, chatbots have taken the marketing world by storm. We could hear about them on digital conferences covering cutting-edge marketing technologies, and we often heard examples of major brands and companies employing the power of AI and machine learning through chatbots.
The reason for this renaissance in chatbots (remember, there have been some underwhelming efforts in early 2000s) is that customer support is more important than ever. Customer behaviour has changed – as well as their interaction with brands – and they want answers right here, right now.
To cater to this need using human staff only is an incredible burden. Not only will your company spend an awful lot of resources to be able to respond to all queries, but your support staff might become burned out because there’s more customer interaction than ever before.
Without a doubt, chatbots are a great way to tackle this issue. However, it all starts with optimizing their performance – if they don’t work well, they’ll bring more damage than benefits. So, you need to make sure that you have perfect chatbot scripts that have the highest chance of resolving each customer query, or at least the majority of them.
Map Out Your Customer Journey
Image source: Green System Solutions
To correctly predict what your customer are about to ask or request, you need to have an exact idea of your customer journey map (CJM). This is a scheme that shows exactly which steps a customer has to go through to purchase your product.
While you’re developing your script, take a moment with every step in the CJM and identify the possible scenarios where a customer might get stuck and ask for help from customer support or the sales team.
The ultimate goal is to have a script ready for any question your customer may have. This seems hard and almost impossible, but when you think about it, with the customer journey map, there’s only a finite set of options and decisions your customer can make – which implies that there is a finite amount of issues they may have.
Check Out Support Analytics
Image source: Good Data
Before you start developing your chatbot scripts, take a long, hard look at your CRM stats and history and comb through some of the most frequently asked questions. Your customer support history will tell you all there is to know about your customer’s questions.
After you’ve analyzed the basic questions, pay attention to one-off, unusual queries your support team might have gotten. If they happened once in the past, there’s a chance it will happen again, so it’s worth it to include these scenarios in your script as well.
“In all areas of business and marketing, the audience response in analytics is the most precious source of insight you have. It allows you to operate and make decision not based on hunches and intuition, but hard, numerical facts. When you’re developing a chatbot, a lot of the issues that can be predicted and prevented can be identified in support CRM analytics”, says Miriam Wilson, a marketer at Subjecto.
Extract Most Commonly Asked Questions
All of your chatbots scripts should be clear, relevant and high-quality, but you should pay special attention to those that reply to the most commonly asked questions.
Not only that, but you should also tread lightly with questions that signal a high possibility of purchase (i.e. “a hot lead”). These are questions like “How can I order?” or “Which payment methods do you accept?”
If you are afraid of a chatbot handling your hot leads, you can also direct your customer to a human agent, or let human staff take over the chat when these types of questions appear.
Get the Texts and Style Perfectly Right
Image source: LiveZilla
This is very important to remember: a customer will be aware that they’re talking to a chatbot, but they still expect a high level of professionalism in the script, and how your chatbot “talks” and “behaves” will reflect on the reputation of your company or brand.
This is why it’s so important to invest in great chatbot scripts. If you don’t have a knack for writing, you can hire outside experts and freelancers to do it for you. In any case, it’s always better not to skim on this, because these are scripts and texts that will be used for years and will save you a ton of money in support staff hours.
You can use some of the following tools to make sure your scripts are up to par: Grammarly (to check for grammar and spelling errors in your scripts), Studyker (writing service that can compose your chatbot scripts), Freelancer (to find chatbot experts who will craft the script for you), WriteScout (if you want to find writers for your chatbot), ClassyEssay (writing checker that will perfect the flow of your texts) or TopEssayWriting (to compose a chatbot script that will have zero mistakes).
Keep an Eye on Chatbots after the Launch
Okay, you’ve done your research, identified the most commonly asked questions, crafted your script – it’s launch time!
Launching a chatbot definitely doesn’t mean that you’re now “free” of all customer inquiries and that you completely solved customer support once and for all. Sure, that would be awesome, but you will have to check up on your chatbot every now and then.
The most important thing is that your chatbot is able to identify whether it has solved the customer’s issue, so that you leave no queries unsolved or unanswered. This is usually done with a final script question: “Was this what you were looking for?/Did this solve your issue?”. If the customer answers with “no”, they should be directed to a human agent.
Change and Adapt When Necessary
As you’re keeping an eye on your chatbot, you will quickly find out where things are going off-book and where scripts are not producing the desired outcome. This is not the end of the world – it’s very hard to get a chatbot script right from the first time. Luckily, you can always tweak them and make sure that they are actually helping customers and doing what they are supposed to.
Conclusion
As soon as you develop the perfect chatbot script, you will see tremendous improvements in your customer support effort, costs and overall success of your brand. You will also probably start getting reviews of how your customer support platform is helpful and efficient – even when no human agents get involved!
It’s definitely an investment that will significantly pay out in the long-term. So, make sure you set aside enough time and resources to craft the perfect script before launching your chatbot service.