Best Practices to Create a Chatbot Flow

Essential tips that will help you design a successful Veriflow chatbot for your business.

If you're reading this guide, you're probably about to implement a chatbot into your business. This guide will help you create an effective chatbot strategy and make the most out of chatbots for your online business.

Planning Phase

List all your problems

You’ve learned a lot about chatbots and can’t wait to start building your own.

Before you do, though, let’s take a step back and think about your business’s problems that you want to solve with a chatbot. You can open a Miro board or Whimsical board and enter all of your issues by topic. You can rank them to see which of them are the most pressing. This will help you to map out your problems and determine which of them are the most important for you to solve.

Plan your chatbot story

Creating a gripping chatbot story is not an easy task, and it might be hard to build in the first place. So, if you’ve never written a script for a chatbot, check out some good examples first. You can chat with some existing chatbots to get inspiration and find out what characteristics make them engaging.

Building Phase

Set up chatbot greetings

First impressions matter. Chatbot greetings will help you get them right.

You should use a compelling welcome message to make the user’s first meeting with a chatbot memorable. Also, you can create various greetings for different pages and channels to make your chatbot experience more contextual.

Design your chatbot’s personality

Your chatbot can be much more than an additional way for customers to contact you on your website. If you give it a unique personality that matches your brand image and website design, you’ll get a smart brand ambassador that can work for you 24/7.

Show the value

It doesn't matter whether you use a chatbot to gather customer emails, deliver after-hours support, or carry out product surveys. Your chatbot should always inform users at the very beginning how it can help them.

If your message is too long for a greeting, plan it right after the welcome message. Make sure your customer knows what they can do with your chatbot.

Also, avoid using too many qualifying questions. They can put your customer to sleep and discourage them from chatting. Instead, use a small amount of copy that hook the customer from the get-go and convince them to stay.

Let your chatbot take a breather

Chatbots can find information and deliver it to a user at the speed of light. Yet, when it comes to conversational interfaces, faster doesn’t always mean better.

When a chatbot sends a lot of messages one after another, a user can’t keep up with reading them and needs to scroll back. That destroys a user’s experience. You can avoid that by using conversation delays. Conversation delays let you decide how long the interval between chatbot messages should be. Proper delays let users absorb information at a comfortable pace and create a more natural experience.

Design the right fallback message

Making mistakes is as common for people as it is for chatbots. So, even if you create a great chatbot, it might still get baffled by the user's question.

If that happens, a chatbot can send a fallback message. It’s a type of message that is displayed when your chatbot can’t match the user’s questions with any chatbot response. A fallback message is a very important element of your chatbot scenario. It gives the bot a chance to recover the conversation when miscommunication happens.

Monitoring Phase

Measure and improve your performance

Your chatbot is up and running. Now, it’s time to see how it's doing and verify whether it meets your initial KPIs.

Last but not least, if you find out that your results are worse than expected, it doesn’t mean that using a chatbot was a bad idea. Your chatbot might be missing just one vital element that’s stopping it from being successful. So, no matter the results, dig deeper to find out what is influencing your chatbot’s performance.