Best practices: Create answers
Welcome to AgentBot! Before starting to upload content to your virtual assistant, we want to share this short guide with useful tips to create and adapt your answers.
STYLE CRITERIA AND COHERENCE
Before writing any content, you should choose the style and voice that will come across in all the answers. This will ensure that your virtual assistant is cohesive and coherent.
How do you want to come across to your users? This is the moment to define if your virtual assistant will use colloquial language (common in informal, relaxed conversations), or formal speech (with proper grammar, maintaining distance). It is also the moment to define the level of complexity that the answers will have. Will they be highly technical? Will they be aimed at the average user?
TIP: Try this exercise. Envision your ideal customer service representative. Focus on the employee that best fits your customer profile: their age, gender and personality traits, though these don’t need to be represented visually. Based on this definition, write answers as if that person is the person who was answering.
CLEAR AND CONCISE
The answers should be short, clear and specific. The content must be adapted to the chat format. In chat, both the way of writing and the length of text are different from the language used on a webpage, email, or user manual. Conversation quality is notoriously low when answers are copied from information found in other channels.
TIP: For long answers—those that require scrolling to read—we suggest dividing the questions into smaller, more specific questions, and next to each answer, suggest or link to issues that complement the information available on the subject.
PROVIDE CONTEXT
We recommend including a brief introduction that provides context to the answer, while keeping the answer concise. Avoid responses that begin with "Yes" or "No," as these are inadequate ways to begin the answer when the question is not interrogative. Let’s look at an example:
• First way to ask: Can I change my cell phone plan?
• Second way to ask: I need to change my cell phone plan.
• Incorrect answer: Yes, it is possible.
• Correct answer: You can change your cell phone plan anytime. Click here to find the plan that fits you best.
DECREASE TRANSFERS
Keep in mind that the virtual assistant is the first point of contact with the customer. The objective of a virtual assistant is to provide solutions. If most of the answers transfer customers to live chat or encourage a phone call, the virtual assistant will become a bothersome first step, and only decreasing customer satisfaction and increasing the company’s costs.
TIP: Deflect users and solve their queries:
1.Quantity: The amount of content is a fundamental. AgentBot cannot give solutions if it doesn't have information to do it with. This requires constant expansion of the knowledge base to resolve questions that do not yet have answers.
2.Quality: Keep answers up to date with current information.
3.Tools: Incorporate all the tools and components the platform offers to enrich the answers, such as maps, pictures, videos, FAQ sections, related questions, etc.
TIP: transfer to internal pages or sections:
1. Briefly introduce the link.
2. If the user will be transferred to a whole new section of the website, provide the first few lines of the most timely and important information in the chat box, and give users the option to expand the link. Many times customers use the virtual assistant to search for specific answers, and to avoid reading all the information on the page.
3. Instead of linking to the home page, and then giving directions to the appropriate section, provide a direct link to the solution.
WELCOME MESSAGE
Welcome messages are not essential. If you choose to include one, make it concise. Welcome, introduction (if you would like to state that this is an automated channel, now is a good time to do it), and that you are available to respond to user questions. If the virtual assistant only addresses one particular topic, you should also state this upfront, to avoid problems later on.
TIP: Take advantage of the Frequently Asked Questions tool from the start, by placing the most requested topics in the second chat box.
DON'T FORGET PERSONALITY
Before launching, it is fundamental that your virtual assistant has answers for welcome, goodbye, thank you, evasive answers and insults. AgentBot comes preloaded with 30 personality questions.
TIP: Load more than one answer for the most common messages and personality answers to make your virtual assistant speak naturally.