Today, most businesses interact with customers using multiple channels and chatbots are among the most popular mediums of communication. Chatbots are brand representatives and a strong link between the company and its clients. Well-versed chatbots can communicate with customers, assist them, and improve their overall experience. However, for a chatbot to do so, it's crucial to provide conversational training and testing to analyze whether it is working or not. Let’s shed some light on the importance of a conversational chatbot and tips that will help train the most effective chatbots. 

Why Conversational Chatbots are Important

Why are conversational chatbots in high demand? Simple chatbots can be developed without Artificial Intelligence (AI) but they cannot handle complex tasks. Hence, many companies like to opt for conversational chatbots that are AI-powered. These intelligent bots can solve issues and handle complex situations with ease. 

AI-powered conversational chatbots are primarily used in the customer support department but they are designed to do more than that. The purpose of implementing chatbots is to scale communication and make it more efficient.

Whenever a question pops up, it's automatically assigned to the chatbot to analyze the customer’s requirements. If the query is a general question, chatbots can instantly resolve the query by providing a series of approved answers. However, if the question is critical, these queries are routed to the customer support team to solve. This allows customer support teams to focus on more important tasks which can only be solved by human intervention. 

Chatbots can take up multiple questions at a time, which ultimately saves time and resources. 

Is a Conversational Chatbot Right for Your Business?

As mentioned, the primary job of conversational chatbots is to support your customer service team. But the question is, do you really need a conversational chatbot? Let’s discuss.

If your customer support team receives the same type of queries repeatedly, it becomes difficult to provide the same answer in different ways. In such cases, a conversational chatbot can be the right strategy. Chatbots can resolve customer issues instantly and in other cases, these chatbots can direct customers to a knowledgebase or self-service center to resolve issues quickly. If your company is facing similar issues, then you might need a conversational chatbot to lend a  helping hand. 

How to Train a Chatbot

Training a chatbot is a lot easier than training a dragon. Training is an integral and crucial part of conversational chatbots. Just like humans, chatbots also need practice when they are chatting with customers, in order to improve their communication skills. Training has a lot to do with the success of a conversational chatbot. 

1. Focus on Target Customers

For a successful training of a conversational chatbot, focusing on customer personas is essential as it allows chatbots to understand the target audience. It helps chatbots build a better conversational flow with the right tone of voice and vocabulary. 

Collecting customer information helps create buyer personas to train the conversational chatbots. Collect data such as:

• Age group
• Gender
• Location
• Language
• Hobbies & Interests
• Buying Behavior 

Once you have this data analyze the information to understand the requirements of the main clients and create a buyer persona. This will help the conversational chatbots understand the buying behavior of the customers. 

2. Train Chatbots to Recognize Frequently Asked Questions

Customers may have several questions to ask and it's essential for the chatbots to answer queries and provide appropriate solutions. The foremost task is to come up with frequently asked questions (FAQs). Gather conversation histories and begin to pinpoint the question that some up the most.  

One single question may be asked in a variety of ways, and can also be answered in a variety of ways. When creating answers, ensure the conversational chatbot recognizes all the possible variations of the question. It is wise to curate various combinations for questions and answers. 

3. Categorize Customer Requests

Once the chatbots are trained to recognize buyer persona's and FAQs, another vital part is to define customer behavior and intent. Creating categories is an essential task for training chatbots. These categories will have a variety of customer requests and queries on the same topic which will help the bot to learn and categorize the questions accordingly. 

For example, one set of frequently asked questions may all have to do with shipping. Such questions can be categorized in group requests.

• When will my parcel ship?
• What is the delivery date of my package?
• When will I receive my order?
• How much time will shipping take?
• My package was damaged during shipping.
• My shipment was lost.

All these questions can be categorized under “Shipping”. Likewise, defining customer issues and categorizing them will help chatbots learn efficiently.

4. Create a Broad Range of Answers

Once you are sure the chatbot is trained to understand the different variations of similar questions, it's time to work on its answering skills. When creating answers, ensure the conversational chatbot recognizes all the possible variations of the questions. 

Apart from the individual questions, focus on covering different topics the customers might focus on in their questions. Create the best-suited responses for each of the common questions. This will allow your chatbot to cover more questions and provide instant solutions.

Setting up some common keywords such as “Shipping,” Delivery,” Subscription,” “Password,” “Billing,” “Exchanges,” “Returns,” and many more.

5. Continuously Improve Chatbot Post Launch

Remember that your chatbot must be constantly improved. After the chatbot has been launched, keep an eye on how it interacts with users. You must identify and correct issues that your chatbot is having. By connecting your bot to analytics, you can identify weak places and monitor how well it runs.

You'll also want to include media components in your chatbot to make it more interesting. Cards, buttons, emojis, and other interactive elements contribute to a more engaging experience. Our clients, particularly those in online shopping, have discovered that these features increase sales. Customers may easily identify and buy relevant products thanks to product suggestions and calls to action.

Adding a chatbot to your customer service department will increase automation and improve overall customer and employee experience and will help your business become a leader in its industry. Customer service automation is critical to future proof your business and excel in the digital age.