Top 10 Chatbot and Voicebot Fails to Avoid #1

When designing chatbots and voicebots, it’s very common for people to overlook the customer’s perspective.

They don’t consider:

• Business objective – customer support, lead generation, after-sales support etc.
• Value for your customers – the most important customer aspects are resolution time, resolution quality (accuracy),  support team availability, …
• How your customers solve their issues now
• How chatbot or voicebot would improve the current status quo

How you should get started:

1. Analyze your processes (for example customer support touch points) 
2. Define what the chatbot or voicebot will be solving
3. Involve your customer support team
4. Assign responsibilities
5. Calculate business impact

Text dialogs are 99% of a chatbot and voicebot communication (the rest are emojis, multimedia content like images, videos and STT/TTS when it comes to voicebots). Copywriting (conversational design in our terminology) is essential. ☝️

Common failures:

• No defined persona
• Not disclosing the communication is held by a virtual assistant
• Lengthy texts (no-go for voicebots especially)
• Unclear conversational structure
• Answers in one long chat bubble
• No buttons to navigate through the conversation
• Fonts not corresponding with websites
• No branding
• No emojis
• Wrong emojis

Tips to improve your chatbot and voicebot copywriting:

1. Involve your marketing team
2. Create an internal team from various departments and roles to test
3. Test responsivness on multiple devices – mobile, tablet, desktop
4. Ask your family and friends to try (different age groups if possible)
5. Take a course (for example at Conversation Design Institute)

Here are some examples of intro messages for our customers:

Don’t write essays because:

• Audience’s attention span is short
• They will stop reading or listening to you
• Customers will bypass the chatbot or voicebot
• Chatbot or voicebot usage will be low
• Business gains will lower over time

On top of that, you spend more money on traffic. Chatbots are usually priced for chat interactions / incoming and outgoing messages, and for voicebots you usually pay per call-minutes.

Tips to improve:

1. Get straight to the point
2. Remove unnecessary information
3. Remove marketing slogans
4. Break long text under more chat bubbles or involve buttons
5. Ask questions and gradually provide information according to the customer’s needs and context

WebChat design:

• Chat color and style is not aligned with your brand identity
• Different font then on your website
• Brand identity not reflected in the copywriting

Tips to improve:

1. Use WebChat welcome pop-up message
2. Choose appropriate color for chat and buttons
3. Set the same font, size and spacing as on your website
4. Use your marketing characters
5. Use your product / service terms
6. Use your tone-of-voice (formal / informal, nodding / howling, company jargon etc.)
7. Custom-Neural-Voice as part of your sonic identity
8. Use avatar of your employee to attract users
9. Use emojis to catch attention
10. And don’t hesitate to use GIFs – thank us later 🙂 

To press a button is faster than writing on a keyboard (or dictating to a microphone). It’s even more valid if you know that roughly 63% of communications are from a mobile phone.

Wrong conversation design:

• Using button-based chatbot only
• Not using buttons at all
• 4+ buttons in one answer
• Long titles in buttons
• No way to go back (no return button)

Tips to improve:

1. Combine AI (Natural Language Processing and Understanding – NLP/NLU) with buttons to navigate the customer through the conversatio
2. Use sub-questions and sub-answers if you need 4+ buttons
3. Split long text between buttons
4. Add emojis to self-explain
5. Add multimedia content (images, videos, GIPHs etc.) to self-explain