How To Optimize A Chatbot

Amazon Go is a convenience store chain that allows shoppers to avoid checkout lines and almost any human interaction while shopping. Through sensors and cameras, a person’s purchase is calculated as it is removed from the shelves and charged to their credit card as they walk out of the store. The ease is unreal.

Automated chat is the ‘Amazon Go’ of the live chat world.

In a recent podcast with Eliav Cohen and Billy Batemen, they tell you point-blank how to give YOUR chatbot better value. Eliav’s experience through using Drift for his hot air balloon company Seattle Ballooning was the start. Now the founder of UltraCool, he partners with Drift to build chatbots that are new, exciting, and highly personalized.

Chatbot vs Forms?

Especially for B2B businesses, often people will let their bots become used like any other form. We recommend you stay as FAR AWAY from this method as possible- in fact, don’t use traditional forms on your site at all! Use your chatbots to connect people to interesting content, to demos, and to book meetings. This is what provides real value to the bot.

Dive in ALL THE WAY! You’re already giving 110% to your business, especially if you’re trying to get the wheels spinning for a start-up. It’s scary to change what you’re already doing for the chance of something better. Maybe we can help ease your worries a little bit…

• There are 70% conversion rates with Conversational Forms and only 30% for WebForms, according to Collect Chat.
• Not only are chat forms more engaging, but they also make a conversion process more personal, eliminate distractions, simplify the process of sorting through data, and provide live help when absolutely needed. (Check out this article by Landbot for details about this!)

The stats are great, people are swearing by it- so what’s stopping you? According to Cohen, “There’s no way to test, ‘Is this working better than a form?’ than literally going full out and testing it and seeing the impact.”

Create A Keyword-Based Chatbot

Keywords are a critical part of automated chat. It’s the sensor and trigger for any incoming messages, allowing you to automate the chat in the first place. They can save your time and your money BUT they can also go horrifically wrong. Here are 2 tips for keeping your keywords in check!

• Are your keywords mixing up with each other? Sometimes when under an all-inclusive setting, the word you’ve programmed responses to exists hidden within many other words. Confused? Eliav talks about how he had to fix his chatbots after several slipups involving a response programmed for “cat” that was responding to questions involving the word “category”.
• Another common issue is if you have a word with many different potential uses! The word “time” was the worst for Seattle Ballooning. Questions like, “How much time does it take? What’s the timeline like? What time should we meet? How far ahead of time should we book?” all required very different answers. The way to combat this? Create very specific exact match phrases for that word. As many as it takes- Eliav had 248 for variations on the word time alone.

3 Tips To Optimize Your Chatbot

So you’ve committed to chatbots, but now what? How can you use that chatbot to do all of these amazing things that we’ve talked about so far? How can you make sure you have a chatbot with value?

1. Dont Just Ask One Question

You can’t only answer their questions- you move someone forward as well. Ask them to book meetings and appointments, purchase content, or even drive a sale. That’s what the bot is for, use it to its full potential! But don’t ask for an email before they can ask a question, people just want their questions answered at first before they start giving you all their information.

2. Mix Up Your Keywords

Make sure your keywords aren’t mixing up with each other. We talked about this a second ago but really, it’s the little mess-ups that push people away.

3. Don’t Be Afraid To Fail

Fail and fail and fail again. According to Eliav though, the secret is in failing in small ways. Learning from those small mistakes will help you shift your chatbot into EXACTLY what you want it to be.