Commonly-Used CHATBOT Questions

What are the key questions your chatbot must have to function well? Find out more in this article.

17 de December de 2020 | por: Nahuel Gomez

Chatbots have become a popular resource used by companies to make their communications more efficient. But which questions should you include in a basic chatbot framework? Learn the basics to include in your chatbot script.

What are Chatbots?

Chatbots are basically a guide to frequent questions that have evolved into a more interactive format. There are currently three types of chatbot:

Menu: these chatbots are very common and can be found all over the internet. They present a menu to the user, who chooses an option to continue with their question.
Keyword: these are able to scan for keywords and associate them with pre-loaded questions to respond to the user. Usually these are combined with menu chatbots.
Contextual: these use both artificial intelligence and machine learning. They are often expensive because of how complex they are to develop, as well as taking a long time as they must be trained to provide appropriate answers.

What benefits can a chatbot provide your startup or business?

See our article about how to qualify leads with chatbots.

Required questions that every chatbot should have

If you are setting up a chatbot or thinking of adding one to your business, you’re probably asking yourself what questions must absolutely be included, which are the key points for a chatbot, and how to do it.

Before beginning to design a chatbot, remember that it is absolutely vital that your objectives are clear (what your chatbot should do, what platforms it will integrate with, and how it will help your project). When you have this clear, you can move on to the next phase of developing the bot:

Introduction: who’s talking?

The first thing that the bot should do is introduce itself. It’s important that it identifies itself as a bot and explains how it can help the visitor.

If we don’t include this step, the rest of the conversation will be founded on confusion.

Include name, (this isn’t required, but it helps to generate more engagement with visitors), make it clear that a bot is speaking and how the user can interact with it (if they should ask questions, choose options, etc.)

-“Hello, my name is xxx. I’m the company’s bot. I’m here to answer your questions. Select an option to start.”

Any type of chatbot (menu, keyword, or artificial intelligence) should also specify that it is possible that the bot may not be able to answer all questions and that is the case the user will be connected to a real person. This helps immensely to reduce frustrations for visitors when the bot does not understand them.

The keys here are: simplicity and honesty.

Fulfill the objective

It is common for companies and entrepreneurs to consider implementing a chatbot to make their processes more efficient.

If you’ve already spent some time receiving the same question repeatedly (for example: “where is your business located?”), you can review previous conversations to determine which questions your visitors ask most frequently. This will help you automate sales processes.

From there you can build a decision tree that the visitor can go through until the conversation is finished. The upside of the menu chatbots is that you don’t have to think of an infinite number of questions and answers, but rather you can confine the questions just to the most common inquiries or to those you consider most relevant.

On the other hand, for keyword chatbots, you have to think of all the possible variations of the same word or concept for the possible questions that your chatbot might receive, and to create a unique response for each one (you can adjust them over time).

Various questions by objective:

Lead generation

– What is your name?

– What is your email?

Appointments

Would you like to schedule an appointment? (if you have additional options, display them).

Include a calendar with available options so your visitors can choose quickly.

Would you like to cancel an appointment?

Sales

– Are you looking for a new pair of shoes? Yes/No

(Yes) – Perfect! Are you looking for something more urban or sporty?

(Urban) – Great choice. Any specific color?

(Blue) – These are the options we have available in that color.

Chatter

This isn’t something you need to worry about in the first stage, but it is a factor that can potentially improve interactions with your bot.

Questions like “how are you?” are common in any conversation, and if your chatbot is not prepared with that information, it can confuse it and lead to a conversation that does not make sense. Let’s look at an example of how the Google assistant responds to this type of question:

-Hello, how are you?

-I’m having a great day so far! I like to feel useful, tell me what I can do for you.

Ideally you can prepare short answers that bring the conversation back to the main objective.

A good chatbot is one able to maintain a fluid conversation, but that makes it clear it is a bot to avoid causing mistrust in visitors. The key here is to avoid what is known as the “uncanny valley.”