When building a bot, the particular use case that you have in mind is a focal point that will greatly impact your bot building process. One of our key tips towards building great bots, advises that bot builders consider their end goal before building and use that to map out their bot conversation.
We will review four common and popularly employed use cases used within Instabot and tips on how to successfully build a bot for each particular case. These four use cases are Lead Generation, Product Selection, Customer Support, and Onboarding.
Lead Generation
With lead generation, bots are useful tools for conversational lead qualification. This approach allows you to ask specific questions to qualify or disqualify prospects all through the bot. Simultaneously, you are collecting information based on these responses that creates robust profiles of the users interacting with your bot, allowing you to spend your time focusing on more qualified prospects rather than unqualified prospects. Once you have qualified your prospect, you can then collect additional information to build an even more specific profile including: contact information, company information, and/or any other information that you would like to have before you reach out to the client.
PRO TIP: Ask qualifying questions at the beginning of the bot conversation, to gather information about what a user is looking for, their preferences, and learn a lot about visitors. After qualification occurs, the conversation can push qualified users to input contact information, so that your team can follow up and move them through the process to conversion.
Product Selection
Similarly to a lead generation bot, you can build a conversation flow that asks questions to ultimately help your prospect make a product selection from a list of available options. Your bot can easily inform your customers on the products you offer, as well as ask questions that identify your prospective customer’s budget, specific need, buying cycle, and any other pertinent information that are needed to make user-specific recommendation.
Once all of this information is collected, your bot can recommend the specific products that meet their buying profile. Thus, cutting through any confusion as to what product they should buy, and pushing your customers through the process faster and easier with a high level of satisfaction.
PRO TIP: Try leveraging conditional nodes in a product selection use case. These nodes can determine which product is best for your customers, based on their profiles and other information they have provided in the bot conversation. This way, your bot can make the most informed recommendation on products and dynamically makes recommendations based on each specific user’s profile and needs.
Customer Support
For Customer Support bots, the main purpose is to provide information that informs and assists customers, in order to offload the amount of inbound inquiries that your customer service reps have to handle. You can build an FAQ bot that handles the most common questions that your team is repeatedly getting, automating the FAQ process so that the bot is handling very common inquiries and immediately providing responses to users. You can add a prompt for users to input “free text questions”, to allow for inquiries that are not built into the bot conversation. This can be a great tool for customer support bots as you can review your analytics and look for similarities in the “free text” inquiries that you receive.
PRO TIP: You can easily add a node that collects free-text questions to see questions your users are asking which might not be currently handled by your bots. Gather and implement this data to optimize your bots, so that all the common questions are able to be handled by an automated bot and step up your customer support. This allows you to build a more and more capable bot over time that can handle and progressively offload the large majority of support inquiries your team receives.
Onboarding Bots
In the onboarding use case, the primary goal is the education of users on your program, and the collection of information to get them started within your internal platform or system.
As with the other use cases, you can easily build a very informative conversation that offers directions and covers basic information beginners need, to educate your users on the process of getting started on your platform. You will be able to collect their information and via API, using our webhook functionality, send crucial demographic information directly to your platform. This means that as users are on boarded by your bot, they are also dynamically pulled into your system. This makes onboarding seamless for both you and your users.
PRO TIP: Create multiple onboarding bots that appear at crucial points in the process. If your onboarding process takes place in phases, have different bots to cover the different stages. This way, the onboarding process is easy to consume rather than having to go through a lengthy bot conversation. You can also set up goals by conversation and stage, to track the user’s progress through the onboarding process.
Instabot works for a multitude of use cases, and can be instrumental in gather important user information and automating a number of business processes.
Hopefully, this has provided jump off points to use for your particular use case. If you’re interested in learning more, feel free to reach out to our team at [email protected].