How to add personality to your business chatbot

Big business is full of personas these days, artificially-crafted idealised-versions of customers, prospects or clients. They are used to help fine tune pitches and products, and now are applied to chatbots, but how can your business make sure yours has the right personality and tone of voice?

Personas are a growing trend these days, not bad for something that doesn’t exist. When brand x is making a product, an advert or even a chatbot, it is aiming it at a persona. That’s an amalgamation of statistics and characteristics that represents the customer.

Adding the persona(l) touch

So, the theory goes, Susan is 35, goes shopping 6.25 days a week and spends 55% of her spare income on food, 20% on her pet cat Fluffy and the rest on sports or down the gym. She donates £10 a month to charity, has used up 60% of her credit limit, and aims to work in European politics when she finishes her evening studies degree, while currently working in marketing. There are some more examples here.

With that image in mind, it is easier for a marketer or developer to build a message that appeals to that sort of persona. And there are some obvious cues you can see there if you wanted to build a chatbot to talk to “her”.

For example, any chatbot could easily be made to ask “do you have a cat?” and run a string of questions about that. It might be relevant to the business, especially a vets, pet store or similar venture. Or, it could be part of the warming up process. A smart chatbot might also know about Susan’s charitable donations, and can ask if she’s had any recent news about the good causes she donates too. That makes chatbots more like talking to a friend in the street and can remove some of the artificiality of the situation.

While most chatbots stick to the script currently, future examples will almost certainly be able to find out more about an individual and use that information to personalise the chat. However, if your business clients are generally a bunch of swarthy builders in the trade, the persona needs to be more direct and to the point.

The right persona for your business

Whatever the size of your company, there are people who work there who know and understand your customers on a detailed level. These are the people you should be talking to when building up a persona.

They can help define the interests that can provide that little extra bit of welcoming chat, the tone of voice needed to resonate and appeal to them. All of that might not sound much to the harsh money-focused business leader, but is essential for building a bot that welcomes and connects.

Even a simple interaction like booking an appointment through a chatbot, requires some level of confidence and connection with the bot. The more your bot does for the company, the more the user needs to feel good about chatting to it. So, for tasks like sales or bookings, the chatbot needs to be just as good as a customer support agent on the other end of a phone.

How to build a bot

While that sounds complicated, there are many ways to build a fully-functional, clever and engaging chatbot. There are a growing number of useful online services to build a chatbot that can be added to the front of your website, social media or app. Finding the best one for your needs may take a little hunting with varying degrees of cost, service, artificial intelligence and other features to consider.

One of the best is the totally free SnatchBot, offering a simple design interface, analytics and natural language to help build a creative and engaging chatbot that can be deployed to any app, website or Facebook Messenger, where most of the fun chatbots hang out. You can use the service’s library of existing examples and templates to find a solid example that fits your market and will help set you on the right path.

Add in some interesting questions or comments for your typical customers and you can build a valuable, time or money saving, chatbot in short order. Using the analytics tools, you can see how it performs, what questions or sections work well, and what needs improvements, with updates going live instantly, saving a great deal of effort.