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Best practices

Owned by Sofía Ríos (Unlicensed)
Last updated: May 08, 2017 by Carmen Camacho (Unlicensed)
5 min read

To run a successful campaign with Smart Chat, we suggest you follow these steps:

 Have a clear goal

Why do I need to run the campaign?

The first step to run an effective campaign is to have a clear understanding of why do you need to establish a conversation with your contacts. This definition will guide you through the design process.

Examples of goals for a campaign:

  • Audit the quality of service
  • Activate a service
  • Make cross-selling of products / services
  • Promotions
  • Perform preventive collection
  • Update customer database
What do I expect from the campaign?

You must know in advance which data you want to obtain from your contacts. This definition will help you to choose the correct type of Questions during the design process.

Examples of data:

  • Numerical rating of the service provided
  • Confirmation of a received product
  • Intent of purchase of a new product
  • Date / amount  for a payment promise
  • Email
To whom will I send the campaign?

You must identify your target contacts; those that can give you the data you need.

Examples of target contacts:

  • Customers who made purchases in the last 30 days
  • Customers who have a credit limit of $ 25.000
  • Customers who hired a service in the last 15 days

It's important to have a mechanism to get the information from our customer segments in an automatic and reliable way to reduce manual labor that could result from executing daily or weekly campaigns.
Therefore, it is recommended to work closely with your IT area to implement a means for automatic extraction of contacts in accordance with the characteristics defined in the target segment.

How do I motivate the answer?
You must give your contacts a reason to interact with your chatbot


  • Tell them about the benefits of answering; e.g.: condoning interests, get discount.
  • Inform about the disadvantages of not answering; e.g.: bad credit history and rating, collection fee.
  • Offer an exclusive promotion; e.g .: participate in a draw.





Design the dialogue

Design for SMS

  • Don't use too many open questions.  We must consider that, because of the size screen and keyboard, can be annoying to answer questions in great detail.

WHEN REDACTING YOU QUESTIONS REMEMBER: 149 is the maximum number of characters you can send in a single SMS using SmartChat.



TIP: Watch the counter for characters and messages that appears in the editing window of Questions and Actions. With this counter you will know if the text can be sent in a single SMS message or whether it will need more.
Call to action
  • Identify your business in the first message sent to the contact; this builds confidence by establishing that there is a relationship. 
  • The first message must be clear and precise, it's important to find ways to keep it short.
  • You must call to action through concrete questions, explaining why their participation is important

Example:

BANK BM: Please, rate the service of our DEL VALLE branch and help us improve. From 1 (bad) to 5 (good), how friendly was the teller?



Identify the custom data you need

Make a checklist of all the data you need to share with the contact or is required to perform some action within the dialog

For example:
  • Contact's name
  • Name of a branch office
  • Amount of overdue payment
  • Deadline for overdue payment
  • Name of product
Determine the order and type of questions/actions
  • We recommend to go from the most general to the most specific question

  • The complexity of the questions must go from easy to complex

  • Questions should be arranged so that the response to a question doesn't influence or skew a later question. 

  • Depending on the data sought to be obtained, some types of question / actions are more effective than others. Check the Questions and Actions sections to see the details.

Additional recomendations:

Check the What's a question? and What's an action? sections for more details.

Writing 
  • Use terms that result familiar to your contacts.
  • Avoid using ambiguous or subjective words.

cross (x) Ambiguous

Service was fast?

Objective

Were you attended in less that 10 minutes?


Take care that the wording of the question does not suggest an answer.

cross (x) Suggestion

How do you rate our service? (Excellent, good ...)

No suggestion

From 1 (bad) al 5 (excellent) how do you rate our service?


The first message should show the options that we want to be selected more by the contacts. Use a secondary flow to show the options of less interest to your business.

cross (x) Not recommended for first option menu

BANK BM: your credit has a balance due of $ 1,200 to 3/3/16. Avoid lowering your credit score and choose 1) Payment Promise 2) Already paid 3) Can't pay 4) I'm not a client

 


Recommended Flow

First message

BANK BM: your credit has a balance due of $ 1,200 to 3/3/16. Avoid lowering your credit score and choose 1) Payment Promise 2) Other

Flow activated when the contact selects OTHER

Other options: 1) Already paid 2) Can't pay 3) I'm not a client

The questions should relate to one aspect or logical relationship, should not be double (two questions in one).

cross (x) Negative

During your last visit: Was the service good? Did we solve your problem? (Yes / No)

 

Positive

During your last visit: Was the service good? (Yes / No)

Did we solve your problem? (Yes / No)

Write questions in positive terms; using negative terms causes trouble when trying to interpret the data.


cross (x) Negative

Wouldn't you want to acquire a pre-approved personal credit for $ 35,000? (Yes / No)

Positive

Do you want to acquire a pre-approved personal credit for $ 35,000? (Yes / No)

Do not ask anything too complicated to answer or that requires checking on an external source.

cross (x)Requires checking

Please, give me the date in which you renewed the service (mm/dd/yyyy)

You can answer from memory

Did you renew the service last month? (Yes / No)

 

Run a pilot

To run a pilot with a small segment of contacts, before sending the chatbot to the entire target audience, is the best way to increase the number and quality of the conversations.

We recommend choosing a small sample (which can be between 2% and 10% of the segment) to test the effectiveness of the chatbot designed.

Some aspects to evaluate at the end of the pilot:

    • Rate of redemption (contacts respondents / total contacts)

    • Detect unexpected variable values, erroneous flows, consider whether the duration is appropriate

    • The questions are in a logical order?

    • The questions are understood?

    • What difficulties found the contacts to complete the questionnaire?

    • Did you obtain all the data defined in your goal?