A Complete Guide To Personable Chatbots

By Aayushi | June 27, 2024 11:08 am

Personality matters- be it a human or a chatbot. Chatbots are used by almost every business nowadays, as tools of communication with their customers. But, just generating responses and answering customer queries is not enough. The conversation needs to be human-like, interesting and engaging which can be achieved by creating a personable chatbot, also known as a chatbot with personality, with chatbot building software like Appy Pie’s Chatbot Builder. Let us get into the depth of what personable chatbots are and why we need them.

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What are Personable Chatbots?
Benefits Of Having A Personable Chatbot
How Do You Determine The Personality For Your Chatbot?
How To Leverage A Chatbot’s Personality?
Conclusion

What are Personable Chatbots?

A personable chatbot is basically a chatbot with personality. Personable chatbots do everything that a normal chatbot does, but respond in a more human-like way, have a conversational tone and create a good interactive experience for the users. They are AI-driven conversational agents that aim to create natural and engaging conversations and show personality traits such as humor and empathy.

Personable chatbots use natural language processing to understand, analyze and respond to conversations in a way similar to how humans do. They can figure out the context of a conversation by recognising user intent and maintain the flow of conversation accordingly. Emotional Intelligence is another feature that personable chatbots exhibit and have the ability to respond with enthusiasm, empathy, or any other emotion which the user input is reflecting.

Benefits Of Having A Personable Chatbot

A personable chatbot is an essential part of any customer support strategy and has quite a few benefits to offer which are as follows:

Improved Customer Service

Personable chatbots answer customer queries with empathy and even humor at times and make the conversation feel smooth and personalized. They address customers’ concerns better and help them reach a reasonable solution to their problems. This leads to a good customer experience as the conversation is fun, engaging and personal. Responses generated by a personable chatbot are clear, concise and are put forward in a friendly manner which reduce a customer’s stress and frustration and improve the overall customer support system.

Increased Customer Retention

Not only do personable chatbots improve customer experience, they also help in retaining them. A customer will keep coming back to a helpful and friendly bot if they have queries and trust it to provide prompt and correct resolution. This helps increase and strengthen a company’s customer base by retaining old customers and also attracting new ones through good word of mouth. A customer might not keep seeking to talk to a live agent to express a concern but rather have a conversation with the chatbot itself if it provides the same type of responses as a human agent would.

Market Differentiation

It’s important to make your brand stand out in the market, for which you need a separating factor. This factor can be your exceptional customer service through the use of personable chatbots. These chatbots give a competitive edge to a company by keeping their customers satisfied and increasing their customer base. This in turn, helps in lead generation despite the market competition.

Brand Loyalty

A personalized chatbot responds to customers in a way that makes them feel heard and valued. This creates a sense of trust and belongingness in the minds of customers and they become loyal to the brand. They keep choosing it instead of its competitors due to its exceptional customer service. The goodwill of the brand also increases and public image improves. This is extremely important as a strong brand loyalty has long-term benefits in terms of customer retention and increased market share.

Emotional Support

A personable chatbot helps provide emotional support to customers better than other chatbots and can actually make a deep understanding of user intent to give empathetic responses which the user finds relatable and relevant. It’s very important for the consumer to feel comfortable and respected when in conversation with a bot. They should also feel engaged in the conversation as a boring and abrasive bot leads to increased bounce rate which decreases website traffic.

How Do You Determine The Personality For Your Chatbot?

There are a number of important points to consider when determining the personality for your chatbot-

Reason for Use

The first consideration when determining your chatbot’s personality is its primary usage and the reason why the chatbot was created and what purpose it solves for the company. For example, In an e-commerce company, a chatbot can be deployed on the website to handle returns/refunds and help the user navigate through the company’s policies. In this case, a chatbot’s personality should not be humorous because no customer would want to hear a joke when they’re facing issues with a product they purchased. A humorous personality can be given to a chatbot, say on a social interaction website or app where the users seek to have interesting conversations and a fun experience. Thus, the reason for using a chatbot is a differentiating factor when it comes to determining personality.

Consistency With The Brand

Creating a chatbot that aligns with the brand values, procedures and guidelines is crucial to maintain brand consistency and identity. The tone, design and overall personality of the chatbot should be similar to how the brand has maintained previously in other areas to strengthen brand recall value and fixate an image of the brand in the minds of customers. Audience expectations and also play a significant role in this matter. A website for teenagers should have a fun tone while one for business professionals should have one that’s more serious and focused. The chatbot’s personality should depend on the brand’s vision and mission. For example, a consultancy firm chatbot providing advice to businesses should be informational and intelligent while one for a mental health site should be more empathetic and emotionally intelligent.

Target Customers

Make sure to understand your target audience before developing a personality for your chatbot as the conversational flow, tone and type of response generated changes with different target audiences. If a company’s target audience is mothers, the chatbot should have a soft, empowering and helpful tone and should generate responses with lingo the general age-group of mothers would understand and relate with. On the other hand, if the target audience is GenZ, the chatbot can give responses with slang and jokes that are trending to engage customers. Aspects related to the target audience like cultural values, demographics, thought process, needs and preferences etc. should be given due consideration in this respect.

Selecting Chatbot Personality Attributes

Careful selection of chatbot personality traits to attribute is another important consideration in determining bot personality. The traits can vary from being simple and direct like humor, friendliness, wit, sarcasm etc. to being complex ones like agreeableness, openness, conscientiousness and so on. Choosing the right chatbot personality types and traits is vital to ensure suitability of the bot with company standards and customer preferences and expectations. These traits determine how a bot reacts, understands and responds to certain user inputs and if the response makes sense in the particular context.

How To Leverage A Chatbot’s Personality?

After you have created a chatbot and determined its personality, it’s time to leverage it and deliver good user experiences. Here are some ways in which you can take advantage of a chatbot with personality and reap its benefits:

Salutation

A salutation is a greeting or an opening message a chatbot can prompt to the user on their arrival on the website or when they open the chatbot. This creates a good first impression and the user considers engaging with the bot to seek help for any roadblocks they’re facing. A greeting can be like “Hey, can I help you with something?” or something similar. It is a good way to welcome the user and let them know that their problems will be heard and solved, which improves brand image and leaves the consumer feeling content.

Ability To Answer Out Of The Box Questions

It’s not necessary that a customer will ask questions related to the product/service only. They can ask a variety of questions which might be absolutely out of the box. In that case, a bot cannot stay silent and not give any response. They need to build conversation with the user as it is an opportunity to connect with them. A chatbot should be equipped with the data to refer to and the kind of responses to generate when a question unrelated to the product or service offered by the company is asked.

Discipline and Respect

A chatbot should not keep giving prompts and popping up every few minutes while users are navigating through the website as this can cause them to get annoyed and leave the website, which will deeply affect the website traffic metrics as the bounce rate will increase. To avoid this, a chatbot should be trained as such and should be given a disciplined personality so that it doesn’t disturb the user unnecessarily. Furthermore, it should also generate respectful responses that don’t make the user uncomfortable or make them feel offended.

Clear Responses

If a chatbot doesn’t understand a particular user query or input, it should give a response that clearly mentions without any ambiguity that it doesn’t understand what the user is trying to say rather than giving repetitive responses which are of no value to the user. If a chatbot keeps sending the same message over and over again and provides no actual solution, it wastes the user’s time and leads to frustration. A bot should also close out a conversation with a user in a respectful and clear manner as it helps maintain a good impression of the brand and its customer service system.

Humorous Tone

Using humor as a chatbot personality trait can be a great way to interact with users as it reflects a welcoming and fun personality of the bot. When a joke or two is incorporated in the bot’s messages, users are more likely to continue the conversation and seek solutions to problems faced by them. However, humor should be used at the right place and right time. Humor used at inappropriate times might lead to customer dissatisfaction and defy the whole purpose of using a chatbot.

Also Read: How To Transform Customer service With AI Chatbots?

Conclusion

To sum up, mere creation of a chatbot isn’t enough to deliver a good customer experience. It requires incorporating some personality into it as well. By leveraging the benefits of a personable chatbot, businesses can further improve their customer support strategy and achieve growth through customer satisfaction, retention and loyalty.

Aayushi