More and more businesses bet on chatbots to design conversational experiences for their consumers. Back in 2018, there were 300,000+ chatbots on Facebook alone! And experts predict that the global chatbot market size will reach $1,25 billion by 2025.

No wonder:

The benefits of chatbots for business are many: better engagement between a brand and consumers, instant response, 24×7 availability — all this provides personalized service to customers and serves as an extra sales channel for brands.

Above all those benefits, chatbot scalability stays:

According to the data from Juniper Research, chatbot technology helps reduce business costs by up to $8 billion, and it will save businesses 2,5 billion customer service hours by 2023. Chatbot growth has been phenomenal in the last few years, with 87% of consumers reporting neutral to positive experiences interacting with this tech.

Despite all the benefits and promising statistics, myths and prejudices about chatbot technology are still alive in the business world. It’s time to debunk them once and for all, don’t you agree?

In this post, you will find seven myths about chatbots, with argumentative messages on why these preconceptions are not what they seem to be.

Let’s dive in!

#1: Chatbots will replace people

Yes, the first and foremost benefit of chatbots is that they can work round-the-clock and provide instant responses to consumers even outside operation hours, therefore satisfying those who don’t want to wait.

Plus, a business doesn’t have to hire dozens of agents to answer customer queries 24/7. One chatbot can address hundreds of consumers simultaneously; so, people wouldn’t wait in line for an answer. By automating this process, brands save cost and time.

An easy call seems to fire all the agents and let chatbots do all the job, right?

Not quite.

First, most consumers still prefer human assistance: 86% want to speak with a human instead of chatbots, and 60% are ready to wait in a queue for a human agent to connect and help them.

And second, the features of most ready-made platforms for creating chatbots still can’t make this technology super intellectual and close to human beings. Today’s AI is still unable to lead a consumer through the whole sales funnel template, not to mention that only large companies can afford the development of such systems.

So, don’t hurry up to replace your support agents with chatbots. Let AI deal with common queries where canned responses and minimal personalization are enough for a positive user experience. And your agents can instead focus on more individual cases and strategic activities.

#2: Chatbots go for a whole sales funnel

Some still consider chatbots a magic button: Just push it — and sales will start going through the roof. But the reality is that the more complex product we have, the more factors will influence its promotion and sales, and the more complicated this system will be.

Yes, a chatbot can serve as the link between the Interest and Desire stages of the AIDA model.

If selling an ABC product to an audience who’s already interested in it, a few steps can be enough:

• Invite them to a messenger.
• Answer several questions with a chatbot.
• Share a payment link.

But speaking of complex work with more complicated products, chatbots won’t be enough to move a consumer to action. The process will require several tools, platforms, services, and people; plus, you’ll need to test regularly, supplement, and correct every stage to boost conversion.

The automatization of some stages in the sales funnel is worth your efforts by all means, as it will save your time and budget. But it’s not reasonable to expect that chatbots can automate everything so much that you won’t have to do anything else.

It’s more reasonable to suggest that chatbots will help improve engagement, reduce the number of missed clients, enhance customer experience, and gain a competitive advantage.

Consider your chatbot a permanent participant in the process rather than the only instrument your business needs to hit the market.

#3: A few standard messages are enough

Here goes one of the most common misconceptions about chatbots for business:

Three to five canned messages are enough for a consumer to rid the mind of doubt and give you money.

Sure thing, a business doesn’t have to craft cumbersome systems or complex scripts for a chatbot, especially if it’s their first automatization attempt. The bare fact that the audience from social networks comes to a messenger for answers will help improve lead generation.

But rather than sit and hope that a few standard chatbot messages will bring you qualitative leads, it would help focus on customer segmentation by interests and needs.

With this information ready at hand, you can prescribe a few different chatbot scenarios for different audience segments, therefore offering a personalized solution for each.

Thus, you can segment the audience by the following attributes:

• Product preference (looks for a green TV but ignores refrigerators; wants to study web design, not copywriting; needs a divorce, not a criminal lawyer)
• Readiness to buy (looks around and chooses; ready to buy right now; potentially interested but not sure if he needs it)
• Motivation (out of boredom, it’s trendy, an urgent need, as a gift)

These attributes may be different for each specific business, and you can (and should) combine them for a more accurate understanding of consumers’ motivation and case. Your chatbot’s messages and calls to action to each audience segment will depend on that.

#4: With chatbots, you don’t need email marketing

Sometimes, marketers oppose chatbots to email marketing, giving arguments like, “people don’t check their inboxes and don’t open all the emails there, but they read all the direct messages on social media.”

Sounds like it makes sense, but there’s a small catch:

Unread messages on social media annoy people more than unread emails because they check inboxes less often. So they might open a message to get rid of that red flag distracting them from scrolling a news feed, but it doesn’t mean they’ll read it.

Besides, given that social media networks are more private than email, marketers need to be doubly careful and monitor user reaction to messages, therefore adjusting the frequency of interaction with their target audience.

As for the opposition of chatbots to email marketing, these two channels do not contradict but complement each other:

• First, you let a user choose a communication channel with our brand. If they prefer messengers — okay, but there are also chances they’ll choose email.
• Second, the features of messenger platforms aren’t as developed as that of email platforms, which doesn’t allow marketers to automate all processes.
• Third, both a chatbot and an email can play their role in the sales process: while email is perfect for transactional messengers, chatbots are for fast communication when a user wants to get feedback right here and now.

#5: Chatbots ensure lead generation

Another popular myth about chatbots in messengers is that it’s enough to create and launch one for your business so it would start generating leads.

Sure thing, it doesn’t work this way.

A chatbot won’t crawl the internet searching for people who want to buy your product. To make it work and bring results, marketers first need to attract targets to messengers, using standard lead-generation tools.

If you can’t do it yourself, you can always ask for help from experts who will assist you in bringing in customers from the internet.

It may be via PPC or targeted ads, CRM, email, all the benefits of SEO for small businesses, corresponding widgets on your website, or even going offline and inviting people with QR-codes.

#6: Chatbots don’t need “Unsubscribe” buttons

When training their chatbots to send promos, news, or special offers in messengers, some specialists “forget” about an unsubscribe button. Two reasons:

1. They don’t know about this feature.
2. They are afraid of losing subscribers.

But it stands to reason that retaining your followers like that won’t lead to any positive results.

Users unwilling to receive more messages from you will simply ban your account, which is not that great for business reputation. So your info chatbot should always provide an opportunity to unsubscribe.

Each messenger platform implements unsubscribe methods differently: It can be through a link, a button, or a keyword.

#7: Chatbots don’t work

This myth comes from chatbot tech’s disadvantages. Yes, despite their growth and assisting businesses to run 24/7 with no human error, chatbots still have challenges and are not as perfect as we expect them to be.

A considerable challenge for chatbot customization is the limits of NLP (Natural Language Processing):

While a chatbot can understand words and phrases, it still can’t analyze their every possible meaning. So when a person writes to a chatbot using words that can have multiple meanings, irrelevant answers may come, driving some to conclude that chatbots don’t work.

Plus, as already mentioned, most consumers still prefer human assistance. In so doing, users make business owners and marketers wonder if it’s worth spending resources on chatbot technology.

But this myth is easy to debunk if you use chatbots right and don’t expect them to do all the lead generation and customer service for you.

 For that, make your chatbot:

• Work with followers and customers only
• Allow users to unsubscribe
• Segment the audience and send the relevant content to each group
• Go easy on the number and frequency of messages it sends

Also, try not to give chatbots more responsibility than they can handle. And train your customer agents to take up the communication in messengers upon a user’s request.

Takeaway

The growth of chatbot technology is hard to deny, given all its benefits for businesses to save cost but enhance customer experience.

Yes, chatbots still have some challenges and disadvantages, thereby raising myths, prejudices, and doubts in those new to this technology. But with a fully managed chatbot platform at hand, you’ll build an engaging instrument to automate chat communication and grow your business with a personalized approach to every customer.

The post 7 Myths About Chatbots in Messengers to Debunk Right Now appeared first on Botsify.

Do you know when the first chatbot appeared?

Chatbots had got their start in 1966, far before messengers and live chats themselves!

With NLP and NLU on board today, more and more brands bet on chatbots to design conversational experiences for consumers and reach their marketing goals. Not far to seek: More than 300,000 Facebook chatbots are active today.

Still doubt if you need one?

Maruti Techlabs name seven reasons for you to design a chatbot for business:

Thousands of users will interact with your chatbot on Facebook, so designing it requires a set of best skills and practices. It would be best if you considered a chatbot’s personality, tone of voice, the value it provides to users, and how it personifies your brand.

With that in mind, a question appears:

How to write a scenario for the Facebook chatbot so it would help customers achieve goals and make a brand come to life?

It’s not that easy as you might think.

The skills of a creative writer, a UX-copywriter, and a UX-designer are what you need to develop a chatbot that would stand out from the crowd. With all methods you know to boost Facebook ads and organic reach, you’ll need to make a chatbot sound like an interlocutor in a real-life conversation. You will need to consider unexpected scenarios and ambiguities that might happen in a user journey.

Imagine that a user is a protagonist and a chatbot – the second character of your play, and write down all possible scenes with their conversation.

Here go fundamental components to writing a scenario for your Facebook chatbot.

1) Define the Goals of Your Audience

 Your Facebook chatbot should help users get from start to finish. Write a dialogue with their purpose in mind. Every sentence needs to bring a customer closer to their goal.

What can this goal be?

• A user wants your chatbot to answer a question.
• He wants a chatbot to help with problem-solving.
• A user wants to buy from you, so he asks your chatbot to help with that.

Knowing your audience is key to writing personal and original texts for a Facebook chatbot. Two methods to define the audience’s goals are interviews and jobs-to-be-done.

Interviews

 The #1 rule here:

Never ask what they want.

Back in 2014, Helix’s senior user researcher Chuck Liu made it clear: You need no more than five people for an interview, and you should never ask them what they want as it leads to wrong insights. He recommends three alternative questions:

1. What are you trying to get done? (Gather context)
2. How do you currently do this? (Analyze workflow)
3. What could be better about how you do this? (Find opportunities)

It will help you get background information, step into the user’s shoes, and understand what you can improve to solve a problem.

Jobs to Be Done (JTBD)

In the 1990s, the theory emerged, saying that customers don’t need products but what those products do for them.

Known as the Jobs-to-be-Done Theory today, it makes marketers concentrate on situations, motivations, and outcomes of their product/service for consumers to improve it accordingly and fulfill their needs.

In his book, When Coffee and Kale Compete, Alan Klement explains replacing the user story with the job story for marketers to get context and focus on consumers’ motivation to use a particular product.

Example:
When I write a post for Botsify, I want to share actionable advice on using Facebook for business to build authority as a professional web writer and a specialist in the niche.

Once you’ve defined your audience’s goals and expectations from a conversation with your Facebook chatbot, it’s time to identify who they are. It will help decide what communication style to assign to your chatbots so they would speak to your customers naturally.

• Know their geography. Facebook Messenger is the second most popular app around the globe.
• Know demographics. It’s more women than men who use Facebook Messenger in the USA.
• Know Facebook Messenger capabilities to decide where you can go without long dialogues but use buttons instead. With that in mind, your scenarios for a chatbot can change.

Based on demographics, literacy levels, and context of the conversation, you will need to revise the chatbot scenario to speak the same language as your audience. Your well-written dialogue should meet customer experience.

2) Think of a Facebook Chatbot’s Personality

Your Facebook chatbot needs to build trust and help customers. It’s a representative of your brand, so please ensure it has a personality and own voice.

Make it live. Write conversations that would make a chatbot sound like a real person rather than a robot. It’s the trick novelists and screenwriters practice regularly: “If something sounds like it’s written – rewrite it.”

Consider it a social media campaign you need to complete like a boss. Create a list of what your chatbot will do for users to understand what to expect from it when they start a conversation. Also, remember to align a chatbot’s personality with your brand’s voice.

Decide whether you want a chatbot to be entertaining. If you plan it as utilitarian, writing a couple of witty answers will be enough to satisfy users who like asking catchy questions. The entertainment-driven chatbot requires a strong personality and complex scenarios with dozens of algorithms to prescribe.

It’s a matter of balance: too little personality will turn your chatbot into another faceless robot, while too many traits and “clever” jokes can make it sound like you try hard to pretend to be someone you aren’t.

Write a personality guide for your chatbot. (It’s okay to use your brand book and website style guide to shape it.) Imagine it as a fictional character who has a name, a logo or an avatar, and a back-story. The more details, the more engaging your Facebook chatbot will be.

You are welcome to use emojis in conversations but try to avoid setting a gender, so users could focus on a chatbot’s activity rather than drawing attention to its personality.

Make your chatbot patient, friendly, and helpful. Users should enjoy interacting with it. Avoid sarcasm and context humor in scenarios, as they are too subjective, and your bot may offend a person this way.

3) Remember About the Tone of Voice

Your Facebook chatbot needs a versatile vocabulary so that it wouldn’t sound too robotic and unnatural. Its character should develop all the time, based on your brand’s voice and tone. Analyze how users interact with the chatbot and revise dialogues accordingly to get higher conversions.

Every word your chatbot says is a chance to engage, inform, and help customers. Its emotions, invitations to talk, reactions – they all matter for positive conversations.

Trick: include a ‘”typing” indicator to make it seem like a user talks to a real person, not a bot.

Key points to consider when developing a tone of voice for your chatbot:

1. Remember about your brand’s voice.
2. Keep answers short.
3. Use simple language, stick to words everybody knows.
4. Write conversations supposing one-on-one talks.
5. Craft step-by-step advice.
6. Be careful with humor.
7. Make a chatbot sympathetic and responsive.

Sounds challenging? Cooperate with an outsourced writer so that they would help to find the right words for your Facebook chatbot’s scenario.

4) Craft a Welcome Message for Facebook Chatbot

When starting to write a scenario for your Facebook chatbot, focus on its welcome message as it will allow users to understand how to interact with the bot and what it can do to help them.

Don’t forget to add a line ensuring people the bot understands them. Also, please provide them with an ability to restart a conversation.

5) Consider All Possible Algorithms of Chatbot Conversation

What if a user decides to change a topic? What will your chatbot do then? 

 Writing a scenario, work through all possible situations:  

• dealing with interruptions;
• providing suggestions;
• dealing with ambiguities.

Create a flow chart of the chatbot dialogue to overview all the directions a conversation can go. Mind the context. Start with an optimal scenario where a user is happy with your chatbot’s work. Ideally, it would take under three steps.

Then, craft all possible side paths where misunderstandings or some stupid questions might take place. Write phrases your chatbot will use in those cases.

Think of the obstacles users might face on their way, questions they might ask, related needs, or information they might need to complete an action. Craft a chatbot’s answers for each case. Regardless of the option a user chooses, it would help if you had a meaningful dialogue for it.

Write each fragment separately and then add it to your Facebook messenger chatbot’s conversation flows.

Over to You

You know your Facebook chatbot personality, create conversation flows to follow your brand’s voice and engage customers, and consider all possible algorithms and write a scenario for each of them.

And yet, one tiny detail is still here to consider: 

Remember about A/B testing.

To write compelling dialogues and improve your chatbot, test its words and emoticons. Test the use of multimedia content, such as images, videos, and gifs. Check how long your chatbot pretends to be typing. Test when to trigger a dialogue and how to do that. And think of adding selection buttons.

Try Botsify chatbot platform to get much resources and create a user-friendly Facebook chatbot according to your customer needs.

Analyze your chatbot interactions, make it learn new words and options, follow the trends, and optimize it for positive customer experience with your brand.

The post Secrets to Writing Scenarios for Your Facebook Chatbot appeared first on Botsify.