Surviving the Recession: How Chatbots and Voice Assistants can Help Your Business in 2023

Massive layoffs continue to make headlines in 2023 as businesses see a decrease in revenue and fight to stay afloat. Leveraging bots during a recession can be a cost-effective way to improve customer service and increase efficiency. Bots can handle repetitive and routine tasks, freeing up human employees to focus on more complex and higher-value work. Additionally, bots can be available 24/7, which can help businesses stay competitive by providing round-the-clock service to customers.

But let’s be honest, we’ve all had bad experiences with bots. So how do you leverage Conversational AI to better serve your customers and not frustrate them? Here are my best practices:

1. Clearly define the user’s goals and objectives: Understand what the user needs to accomplish and design the conversational flow to help them achieve the specific task at hand. Example: submit a maintenance request
2. Keep it simple and natural: Use natural language and avoid technical jargon. Keep the conversation as simple as possible and make sure the user can understand the responses and their options to keep moving forward in the experience.
3. Give the AI a personality: Having a personality that aligns with your brand enhances the user’s experience. Research even shows users have a higher tolerance for errors when the AI has a personality.
4. Use human-like language: Use human-like language in the chatbot’s responses to make the conversation feel more natural. Offer variation so the experience doesn’t feel stale for frequently used experiences.
5. Design for errors: This one is super important. Anticipate common user errors and design the conversational flow to handle them gracefully. Make sure they don’t get stuck in an endless loop.
6. Provide conversational ways to navigate the visual experience on screen: Enable the users to navigate the screens with voice as well. Example: “Show me the second option”
7. Test and iterate: Test the conversational AI with real users and iterate on the design to improve the user experience. Start testing early by reading the script aloud with someone else. And use tools to listen to the response if there’s an audio output — written word doesn’t translate seamlessly to natural spoken word.
8. Use data and feedback: Use data and user feedback to improve the design and usability of the conversational AI over time. See what inputs customers are using that are not currently supported and iterate on what you’ve built.

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