How to Use Website Chat Tools in WordPress
You’ve heard of chatbots, I assume? Most people know what they are and how they work. What is less known is that bots can be integrated into a website or blog to engage with users and to make the user experience more personal. In this article, we will discuss three key ways that you can use website chat tools in WordPress to enhance your user experience and grow your audience.
1. Create a Compelling Narrative
A good starting point before you begin designing your chatbot experience is to define precisely what you’re trying to achieve. This is especially important to keep in mind when you’re using conversational AI (Auto-Intelligent), which uses natural language processing to respond to user queries and to converse back and forth with the user. If you’re designing a bot that will serve as an automated assistant for your site, you will want to ensure that the narrative that the bot provides is clear and concise. The bot should have a persona and should behave in a manner that is consistent with the brand voice that you’ve established for your site. This is especially important if you’re using a free chat engine, like Skype for Business or Slack, since you don’t want to confuse the user by presenting an inconsistent brand character or narrative.
It is also important to establish what the bot isn’t capable of doing. If you’re using one of the more popular free chat platforms, such as Skype for Business and Slack, make sure that the bot doesn’t handle transactions or provide any financial advice. Designing a chatbot that provides any sort of customer service or sales assistance risks confusing or antagonizing your audience. What’s more, if a user gets confused or angered by the bot’s responses, they might just leave the site altogether!
2. Provide Users With Useful Information
When a new visitor lands on your site, you want to provide them with useful information that will help them discover the content that they’re looking for. In the case of a website search engine, like Google or Bing, this is fairly easy. These search engines have years of experience aggregating content and categorizing it so that users can easily find what they need. When somebody performs a search, the first thing that the search engine will do is scan the text of the website contents to determine the topics and the order in which those topics should be presented. From there, the search engine will display the most relevant results at the top of the page. This is all well and good, but it can be difficult to gain this same level of usefulness from a random conversation with a website’s chat bot.
You can provide users with direct answers to their questions or you can direct them to resources that you think might be helpful. For instance, if a user is looking for information on how to sing, you can direct them to a blog post that discusses tips and tricks for singers or you can have the bot answer their question directly. The important thing is to keep the information that the bot provides organized and presented in a way that makes sense to the user.
3. Generate Leads Or Sales
If you’re reading this, I assume that you’re either a marketer or a salesperson. Chat bots can open up a brand new world of possibility in terms of generating leads or making sales. It depends on what you’re looking for. If you’re looking for leads, you can use tools like Google’s Conversation Search or Microsoft’s Bot Analytics to track the activities of your website’s visitors. With these tools, you can see all the websites and blogs that your audience interacts with and gain valuable insights into their interests, needs, and behaviors. If you’re looking for sales, you can use similar tools to track the visitors that are potentially interested in your product or service and follow up with a sales person or team. You can also send targeted marketing emails to existing customers using their email addresses that you’ve stored in your database. This is a sure-fire way to stay in touch with current and potential subscribers without interrupting your daily work routine by roving from website to website.
The key takeaway from the preceding discussion is to keep your website visitors in mind when you’re designing and developing your chatbot. You want to ensure that the information and the content that the bot provides makes sense and is helpful in the context of your website or blog. A well-designed and -implemented chatbot can be a fantastic asset to your company, provided that you don’t try to shoe-horn it into doing work that it’s not designed to do. Think of it this way: would you want your car to start acting weird just because some software that you downloaded from the internet claims that it’s capable of doing advanced things? Of course not.
If you’re serious about engaging with your audience and providing them with a rich and valuable experience, you should consider investing in a quality chatbot. These bots can take your engagement to the next level and provide you with all the benefits that a live chat would.