Virtual assistants, bots, or chatbots are amazing tools that can help improve efficiency and productivity. They offer simple and easy task automation and save users a lot of time, giving them the option to focus their time on something more important where their skills can be put to use.
“Most professionals today wish that days would last longer and since this is impossible, we allow them to build bot assistants that will help them save time” – Henri Ben Ezra, CEO of SnatchBot. Today there are many bot building platforms where you can build your own virtual assistant in the exact way you want it.
With this method, users are able to improve their productivity through bot assistants even further as they are custom-tailored to their needs. What’s even better is that you can create chatbot assistants without coding knowledge.
Know what you are building the assistant for
Bots can be used for anything. They can be used for various tasks at work, responding to customer support queries, online reservations, shopping, marketing, and so on. These assistants can be effective at elevating your business by helping you find new customers and retain your current ones by reducing customer dependency on human responses.
You need to find the best use of AI with a chatbot and, luckily for you, AI keeps improving and these virtual assistants are only getting a wider range of uses each year. You need to accurately determine your needs before you decide to create a chatbot. Look for places where you are wasting most of your time and where you could need help the most.
Make it simple to use
One of the mistakes that many people make with these kinds of virtual assistants is that they get carried away and create tools that aren’t easy to use. At the same time, business leaders also try to create a solution that will fix all of their issues at once and end up creating a cluttered workflow for their employees.
For a bot to be simple to use, it needs to understand the commands it is given really well and jump to tasks easily. Also, it needs to be built with a great database of possible scenarios that could happen or actions that they would be required to do. At the same time, they need to have a powerful AI.
Make it engaging
No matter if you are building a personal assistant or a customer support chatbot, it needs to be engaging. This means that it not only has to know when to engage with users into a conversation, but it also needs to offer value through it. It needs to be designed to provide important answers, not waste time.
After all, their main goal is to save time and make things quicker, right? For example, if you are running a business where you communicate with remote employees through Skype, add a new bot to this platform and design it to call people on a schedule, send them notifications, search the web, and be able to do all of the things you usually use Skype for.
Don’t force your customers to use your assistant
Even though a large portion of consumers prefers communicating with chatbots and other similar assistants when engaging with a brand, there are still a lot of people that prefer talking to humans or have other alternative ways to come up with the answers they need. Design your assistant to give them all of the options they have available.
It’s the customer that matters and you need to listen to their wishes as a brand. This includes your assistant bot as well. You can even add a button in the chat window which offers customers the option to request to talk to a human.
In the end, remember to find a good bot-building platform that gives you a lot of options, bot cheat sheets, and different bot structures. Once you have all of these features at your disposal, you will be able to mix the right blend you need so that your bot does exactly what you want and works efficiently towards improving your productivity.
