In 2023, it’s no longer a matter of if you should incorporate a bot into your CX team, but when. This guide offers expert tips and actionable advice from Zendesk’s bot building team that will ensure you’re set up for success.
Manager, Chatbot and Self-Service Automation at Zendesk
Chatbot CX Designer at Zendesk
Product Marketing Manager at Ultimate
Automation Expert at Ultimate
Lead Automation Consultant at Ultimate
Austin Lacey
Manager, Chatbot and Self-Service Automation, Zendesk
Before you even begin your bot building endeavors, it’s worth defining the desired scope of automation and what your ideal results would be. Once you’ve established which use cases you are trying to solve, you’ll be able to make more impactful decisions about where to start automating.
In this video on first steps for getting started, Austin Lacey, Chatbot and Self-Service Automation Manager at Zendesk, recommends that you don't begin with automating your meatiest, most complex topic. Work on some of the more granular elements while you get a hang of how to automate, establish a conversation style, and build out some initial bot flows. Tackle a few of your most repetitive FAQs such as order status or password change requests. From there, work on perfecting one channel at a time before scaling to omnichannel automation.
Ehsan Ali
Automation Expert , Ultimate
Before expanding to other channels, pick your highest volume channel to automate first.
Start with your most popular language before moving onto more.
Begin with a 9-5 timeframe where the bot is active, and then move to 24/7.
Take this time to set standards on the conversation style of your bot.
Once you’ve mastered the basics by testing out a few automation flows, it’s time to get strategic about how to make the biggest impact through your bot building efforts. A good starting point for understanding your customers’ needs is to utilize your CX team’s expertise. They are the ones closest to customers, so they know their pain points and their common questions. Iulia Lipatov, Chatbot CX Designer at Zendesk, emphasizes that your support agents offer the best touchpoint for choosing what to automate first. This could include simple things like adding tags in the CRM, routing tickets, and flagging topics of user questions if a query is handed over from bot to human agent. These interventions alone can have a huge impact on cutting agents’ workload so that they can focus on more complex tasks.
Iulia Lipatov
Chatbot CX Designer, Zendesk
Even if you’ve perfectly followed the first two bot building best practices, it is likely that something will eventually go wrong. For example, you may think you have a pretty clear idea of what the conversation is going to look like, but the user journey might be totally opposite. Here, Austin suggests that when mapping out all possible user flows – including what the conversation will look like if there’s a problem and a support agent needs to get involved. In this video on keeping a customer-focused mentality when it comes to bot building, Iulia reminds us that the goal should not be deflection at all costs. Rather, the bot should be treated as a tool that helps create a better customer experience.
Marika Sarén
Lead Automation Consultant, Ultimate
Your bot is only going to be as high performing as the team maintaining it, and both Iulia and Austin stress the importance of building relationships across functions. This can look like connecting CX knowledge with conversation designers as well as learning the lingo necessary to communicate with engineers and IT managers/developers who will help integrate the bot into your company’s existing internal systems. These kinds of project management skills centered on liaising between different functions are what’s going to keep your bot running up to speed and help you to quickly adapt in step with any changes or issues that might come your way.
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The project lead owns the project, and is responsible for internal success & communications.
Your team should include 2-3 bot builders, often with previous experience as support agents. They will own the bot building as well as monitor the chat content once it's live.
The CRM admin owns the CRM, widget, and technical setup.
The backend engineer will be responsible for implementing backend integrations.
Hosam Hassan
Product Marketing Manager, Ultimate
The only way to make sure your bot really works is to launch it and keep iterating post monitoring customer feedback. In other words, it’s absolutely essential that you make data-driven decisions when it comes to optimizing your existing conversation flows. In this video about best practices for data monitoring, Austin emphasizes the importance of investing the time and effort in tracking conversations with customers to identify trends and apply customer feedback when tweaking your flows.
If, for instance, a certain query is consistently escalated from your bot to an agent, it can offer a good opportunity to introduce a new API or make tweaks to the existing flows where clarity is needed. It is crucial to be able to pivot and adjust to these tendencies and trends in order to deliver the best bot experience and minimize your skip self-service rate among enterprise customers.
FCR tracks the proportion of queries that are resolved in the customer’s first interaction with customer support.
AHT measures how long it takes to resolve an issue. This metric is used to monitor a support team’s efficiency.
DOR refers to the rate at which customers do not complete their support queries. This metric helps you identify which points in the bot flow are causing customers to lose engagement.
Measured through customer feedback surveys, CSAT assesses how a product or service fares in comparison to a customer’s expectations.
Austin Lacey
Manager, Chatbot and Self-Service Automation, Zendesk
