Designing Chatbots for Conversational UX

Effective chatbots are making a significant impact on customer support today. The AI-driven, text-based virtual agents can often handle customer queries on their own. In cases in which they can’t, they can connect the customer to the right agent to solve their problem. But the key to this is the word “effective.” Many companies are still relying on sub-standard chatbots, according to a recent article by Raghu Ravinutala writing for TechCrunch.

“Despite knowing this, many of the chatbots we encounter on a daily basis just don’t cut it,” wrote Ravinutala. “They lag, misunderstand simple questions and above all, don’t meet the standard of intuitive design that consumers expect.”

In short, these chatbots are falling down on the user experience, or UX. To improve existing chatbots, creators need to keep at top-of-mind what Ravinutala calls the “conversational UX.”

“Chatbots often function as glorified web forms, without any of the intuition or seamless integrations that consumers expect to see when interacting with ‘smart’ platforms,” wrote Ravinutala. “But the industry has improved dramatically in recent years: Modern chatbot platforms have hundreds of pre-built integrations, which enable companies to connect their existing systems and tools to provide a secure, unified customer experience.”

Customers don’t want to have to guess how to interact with a chatbot; they want the conversation to resemble the way people speak to each other. It’s not an easy prospect: getting machines to understand human language has been a goal of the computing industry for decades, and we’re still not there yet. We are, however, getting closer.

“With every new interface, the goal is to make human-machine interactions better and result in a more intuitive experience for the user,” wrote Ravinutala. “Conversational UX presents a greater challenge because of the nuances involved with human language. It requires careful thought, empathy for the user and significant design considerations to carefully craft elegant experiences.”

Edited by Luke Bellos