As with any technology, there must be a strategic reason for adoption. While chatbots can deliver real value for your business, it must be grounded in a solid plan for achieving ROI. Top organizations define and measure the value they hope to achieve – improving the customer experience, scaling the call center, answering queries faster, or delivering personalized experience. 

Below are three of the top chatbot deployment mistakes. If you have other mistakes you’d like us to add to this article, please send them over.

NO CLEAR PATH FOR HUMAN HAND OFFS 

Too many organizations use chatbots when they should have used a human. While chatbots can mimic human behavior, having clear rules defined for the chatbot to human handoff is absolutely essential to chatbot success. Consider a consumer’s use of profanity when communicating with the chatbot – this may indicate a frustration with the query results. A simple rule that escalates the conversation to a human when profanity is detected can do wonders for customer retention. 

NO CLEAR BRAND ENGAGEMENT  

Communication should be more than transactional – what additional value can the chatbot provide during the customer interaction? Using nudges and reminders to keep customers current, or providing simple incentives such as recipes, trivia, or related material can do wonders for engagement.  

LACK OF AGILITY  

AI is constantly getting smarter and constantly “learning.”  Organizations that take the time to mine the underlying data from inbound queries can accelerate their own understanding of the customer.  

  • Which customers are reaching out?  
  • What are their top queries? 
  • What queries are unanswered? 
  • What times do most queries take place? 

Understanding these questions and identifying how various customer personas are interacting with the chatbot is critical to deploying subsequent engagement tactics that leverage resources and drive customers to their desired outcomes. 

A new white paper from ThoughtFocus outlines the four most important steps for realizing chatbot ROI – organized in a crawl, walk, run approach that deploys specific functionality at each level. A stepwise approach means that consumer value increases at each level. Crawl, walk, run also delivers value faster and minimizes the risk of project scope creep.