Design That Impactful Chatbot Experience!

Why Use Chatbots?

Before we start, we need to answer the question, why use a chatbot? It's a great question to form the basis of this article, let's take a brief look into why we would benefit from using chatbot technology.

An "Impactful" chatbot can solve common requests, which helps with enabling a "self-serve" experience providing immediate help, anytime, anywhere from start to finish. If we dig a little deeper, chatbots can offer a personalised user experience such as.

Remembering user information and applying that to help with requests and issues that facilitate faster resolution times, think about minutes rather than hours or days for some "common" requests that require no input from an agent's end. This alone delivers value to your organisation instantly and also helps by supporting agents in freeing up time to concentrate on more technical tasks at hand.

Although this is a very general look into why you would leverage a chatbot in your organisation it creates a segway into the topic of our article; "Design that impactful chatbot Experience!"

I hope this article inspires you to explore some of the fantastic features that ServiceNow's very own chatbot "Virtual Agent" can bring to your organisation or if you looking for some continuous improvement ideas.

These chatbot principles have been identified and tested through hundreds of ServiceNow Virtual Agent deployments globally.

What Are Your Business Outcomes?

It's in good practice to plan and align your chatbot with your desired business outcomes, start with clear goals and objectives and then build a chatbot experience with that focus.

It's easy to get carried away with all the great features that you can include in a chatbot experience but it's best to focus on goals first, continuous improvements later.

A question you could ask yourself is, what operational results are we driving towards? to give you an example of some business outcomes this may include:

• Reduce email and call volume saving your organisation time and money
• Deflecting common issues from a live agent involvement, allows your agents to focus on more critical tasks
• Improving the user experience and satisfaction, by actionable self-service 24/7 support

Getting Started Is The First Step

Start small, aim big but most importantly, start! Building a chatbot that addresses a vast range of issues in your organisation can seem to be an impossible feat, it's not necessary to cover every request or to create a workflow for every possible conversation.

Applying the "Pareto principle" states that 20% of causes drive 80% of outcomes, Another way of saying this would be that 20% of your organisation's incidents, likely drive 80% of the tickets and support calls. By identifying and targeting the top 20% you can focus on creating solid conversation workflows that solve those problems. Start with a minimum list of topics first and tweak from there.

You can take advantage of ServiceNow's Performance Analytics for scoping out your most common problems this is a quick way to get an overview of your most common issues.

Give Your Chatbot The Company Touch

Personalise the greeting experience: First impressions matter and the chatbot's greeting sets the tone for the conversation, users expect an empathetic experience whether the experience is in-person or via a chatbot. "Generic" greeting's can leave the user wondering if the chatbot is equipped to handle their request from start to completion.

ServiceNow's very own "Kodi" is an excellent example of a chatbot done right powered by ServiceNow's Virtual Agent, link provided about Kodi is referenced at the bottom of this article if you would like to know more.

Here are some ways to increase the trust in your chatbot:

• Giving your chatbot a personality and an identity, either with a customised name, logo or identity, even some fun and quirky conversation flows if it suits the situation
• Display history of their most recent requests
• Provide relevant announcements to the user
• Add dynamics to the conversation, such as the user's name or maybe even remembering a user's birthday

Make Meaningful Conversations

Your interactions should cover a single topic or workflow. If a conversation includes too many questions or feels like it's never-ending, users may get frustrated and abandon the conversation and ask for a live agent.

The completion of the conversation should share the results for the user's confirmation, for example, if the chatbot creates an IT ticket, the record should be displayed with a link, once the conversation has ended your chatbot should prompt the user "is there is anything else that they need?"

Some things to consider; Avoid topics that are broad and lack direct action or results. Instead of "generic" topic names, like "IT issues" or "Payroll" create more specific actionable topics such as: "Check outage information" or "Update payroll address."

Your chatbot conversations should mimic and act more like a Live Agent instead of just a search interface.

• Rely on as few pathways as possible, if a decision has too many pathways, consider a streamlined conversation topic, design or split it into separate conversation topics
• Using chatbot notifications can create an even more proactive and direct user experience
• When designing your chatbot experience, don't look at it as a search interface, this should not be a goal in your chatbot design
• Take advantage of ServiceNow's out-of-the-box conversation topics, these cover some of the most pressing IT and HR issues, these can be modified to suit your chatbot goals

Know Your Chatbots Limits, Fallbacks Are A Must

Rely on fallbacks, every chatbot has its limits your chatbot will not address every problem your users may face. although you could try and address every problem you will suffer from scope creep and topic management issues.

Within a conversation topic, it's not scalable to have pathways for every single possibility, this is where a fallback conversation topic can catch questions that may fall outside of the scope.

Fallback topics can help to:

• Apologise to the user and provide an alternative process
• Search the question in a knowledge base or service catalog
• Leverage ServiceNow's fallback topics that search your knowledge base as well as AI Search which provides "genius" results by returning a single contextual answer as opposed to a list of results
• Suggest routing to a Live agent

Creating A Streamlined User Experience

Respect boundaries while maintaining a consistent tone, IT and HR may have separate experiences each with their own chatbot, so the owners of their respected department could likely lend their subject matter expertise in creating a chatbot tailored to those user experiences.

We also need to consider cross-impact between departments, for example, if an IT admin by accident views an interaction record about an employee's paycheck, ACLs and UI policies can help combat this.

When managing IT or HR chatbot experiences, it's important to use different scopes to manage conversation topics and maintain separate governance.

It's in good practice:

• To ensure a consistent user experience, authors of the chatbots should regularly collaborate with their respective portal owners
• To confirm that the overall language, branding and other common elements are consistent across separate chatbot departments
• Users shouldn't feel like they are being passed between two different teams when they are interacting with each department's chatbot. this should be a seamless unified experience
• ServiceNow has excellent out-of-the-box conversation topics that are separated in each of their scopes while keeping setup conversation topics in the global scope, by using custom greetings and setup pages, that allow you to configure separate greeting experiences depending on the portal

Measure, Iterate, Repeat!

Measure and iterate, you cannot improve what you don't measure, for an "impactful" chatbot you should consistently measure the usage and success so that you can track user adoption and utility.

• Identify the metrics that are important to your organisation, this may include usage, feedback scores, resolution rate
• In creating a dashboard you can visualise the chatbots metrics which can help you focus on where your chatbot can improve the experiences, for example, if there is a topic with a high "incomplete" number use that as an opportunity to improve or re-design the topic, for topics that have no use, you could consider retiring them
• Consider measuring other parts of your organisation to determine what areas your chatbot can automate and resolve

A scenario of how measuring helps your organisation could be that your team is logging a lot of printer issue requests. By drilling down into your analytics you might find a common issue that your organisation faces.

This is could be a good indicator to design a chatbot conversation topic and solution that allows the users to self-serve on this issue, then you can measure the effectiveness by monitoring the case deflections.

And that's a wrap! if there is anything you think we may have missed or you have some suggestions yourself we would love to hear about them!

We do hope you have gained something from this article that might hopefully inspire you to further explore the value that an "Impactful" chatbot experience can deliver to your organisation or continuous improvements to your existing chatbot experiences.

Links And Other Useful Information

To learn more about ServiceNow's Virtual Agent follow this link here

To learn more about ServiceNow's "Kodi" follow this link here

To learn more about ServiceNow's Performance Analytics follow this link here

TCloud Consulting has implemented some of the best chatbots in the biz. If your business is planning to implement a chatbot into your organisation please reach out to us here

TCloud's Virtual Agent & MS Teams Integration video here

Thank you!