3 Easy Patterns In Chatbot Onboarding

I tried 20+ Slack bots and this is what I found.

I have tried to use multiple chat bots, I looked for work related bots, as I don’t need bots somewhere else.

I looked for bots that could have saved me some time but automating me out of something.

I identified a few key problems with Chatbots today:

• Onboarding process just broken.
• It is very unclear how to setup a bot, how to connect to a system and what it can do.
• There are no standards on what bots should support. Have you used a browser? I believe you have. A browser has controls, bookmarks, menus, for instance, you can use a backspace to navigate back. There is no standard or even best practices.
• The quality of bots is very poor. I mostly stuck on onboarding or after I get somehow to play with it.

So what are the possible patterns 3 patterns with on-boarding that can improve you conversion many fold.

2-way account binding with a service account

It is simple to make the following on-boarding.

1. Create an account with your service. Let me call it MyAccount. If you can help people an let the login with a system and import data from there, this step may become trivial.
2. Bind MyAccount with a chat system (Slack, Microsoft Teams, Stride). For instance, you bind MyAccount with MySlackAccount using OAuth 2.0.
3. Bind MyAccount with a 3rd party service you would like to connect with (Google Drive, Jira, Github, Bitbucket, Asana, Salesforce you name it).

Please don’t invent anything there. Here are a few nice examples.

Butter

Stats and Bots

Reveal bot

Handle basic commands

Please handle basic command in your Chatbot. Handle them whatever it takes or you funnel will suffer dramatically.

I and Amir Shevat advise you to handle as a bare minimum these ones:

hi
help
feedback

If you can handle only one response, please return what your bot chat do and how to access the things.

Stats and Bots

Reveal bot

Growth bot

It may be too much information, but too much is better than nothing.

Not all bots handle it well.

Butter

And the last but not least for today.

Make a vivid demo

There are 2 effective ways you can make a demo of your Chatbot.

1. A short video explaining what the bot does and how to get started. Please be minimalistic and it is much more effective to show short videos where they are appropriate.
2. Let a customer try your bot without any configuration, account binding or looking for help. This can be done via a demo buttons with incoming webhook in Slack to send specific demo messages (with hardcoded data) to let a person see the potential value of your service.

If you combine two notes from above your funnel will improve, I promise you.

Here are a few nice example

Butter does it OK

Missions.ai does it well with templates

I haven’t seen it used much, but I did it myself it a simple “Try in Slack” button where a person only allows you to post to a channel where you demonstrate messages from you Chatbot using demo data. Works like a charm.

TL;DR;

• 2-way account binding with a service account
• Handle basic commands
• Make a vivid demo

If you identified a few good practices, please feel free to leave them in comments.

Call To Action

If you want to improve your conversation rate — use these patterns today. I am tired of low quality Chatbots.

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