Best Practices to Use with Your Messenger Bot

Messenger bots are taking the online world by storm, and creating one is super simple and doesn’t take a lot of time. However, messenger bots are only as effective as the people that design and create them. In order to make sure that yours is one of the best, there are a few best practices to follow.

 

The first thing is to make sure that your bot can do whatever you promise customers it can. This sounds like common sense but if you tell customers that the bot can process payments, and then you don’t provide a way to get them to the payment processing page, your bot is not being consistent. That will frustrate customers and turn them off your bot, and your business.

 

Secondly, be concise in your messages. No one wants to communicate with a bot that gives them paragraph after paragraph of text with each message. This will only result in them scrolling up, getting confused, and once again, getting frustrated. Ideally you should keep your bot’s messages to a maximum of 60 to 90 characters. And, if you have to deliver multiple messages at once, keep them to 140 characters, in total, at a time.

 

Once your bot is built, you’ll also have to test it to ensure that it works the way you, and customers, will want it to. Testing itself is a good practice, but testing on different devices is an even better one. Different devices have different screen sizes and again, you don’t want your customer to scroll endlessly to learn the answer they’re looking for. So try big screens, small screens, and all the screens in between to ensure that no matter what device your customers are using, the bot will never be frustrating for them.

 

Lastly, give your bot a name. It will make the customer feel more comfortable with the bot and is a great way to inject personality into something that has virtually none whatsoever. It doesn’t have to be a common name like “Joe” or “Bob” and in fact, it shouldn’t be. One of the reasons “Siri” is so popular is not just because she’s helpful, but also because she has a very memorable name.

 

While there are many good practices you can utilize when creating your bot, and many that you’ll learn on your own during the process, these are a few that will get you, and your bot, off to a great start!

Please contact us at Chat Bot Agency now for help with your chatbot.