Just 2 Steps: Create a Chatbot Character that Compliments Your Brand

Chatbots are the new consumer touchpoints that businesses can leverage for a wide range of marketing purposes. From improving customer service to increasing sales, chatbots can be helpful for brands in multiple ways. Unfortunately, these bots occasionally fail to engage users in long conversations. At times, these chatbots couldn’t even deliver the basic purpose for which they are designed for. To amplify your chatbot usage it is not sufficient to simply deliver an offer, advice or service. We (humans) are not accustomed to communicating with machines. To make conversations interesting we want it to have a character and image just like a living person.

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While creating a chatbot character seems to be a petty issue, you will also need to ensure that your bot represents your brand and communicates its identity to the users. In this blog, we will describe the process you can follow to define your brand identity and create a chatbot character that helps elevate brand recognition and value.

Phase 1 - Identify Your Brand Identity:

“Your brand is what other people say about you when you're not in the room.”

– Jeff Bezos

A brand identity is a one-line description of your brand. It showcases the value proposition and how your brand is perceived by its customers. Giving your brand, an identity creates a distinguishable positioning of your product/service in the market. Not only you should maintain it but ensure that your prospective customers have a similar perception of it. Your brand identity is communicated through your products, social media posts, emails, websites, and chatbots.

To identify your brand identity, think of your brand as a person and the traits you think it would have. Jot down 3 traits which seem to fit and associate them with a character. For instance, you can relate straightforward and sociable to a friend while caring and generous to a mother. This way you will get three defining factors about your brand. This would now direct the type of communication you will have with your present or future customers. Make sure your brand identity is authentic, catchy, original and inspiring because it will carry on for a long time. It is also important for you to take your employees’ ideas into consideration to reach to a more appropriate conclusion about your brand.

Read More: 4 Essentials of making a bot intelligent

Phase 2 - Set Up the Character, Tone & Mood:

Your chatbot should be in sync with your brand identity. This will ensure consistency in communications and messaging. Once you have identified the key characteristics of your chatbot the next step is to define its personality and tone. For a novice writer, it is difficult to understand the character building process. While you don’t need to be an expert novelist to define a chatbot character a little background about the process will be helpful.

To start developing a character answer the 5 basics of character preparation that are - who, what, when, why and how. Know think about the health, gender, mentality, stage of life, nationality and dialect of your character. Once you have defined all these factors you will have a clear idea of what kind of communication you would like to develop through you bot.

Read More: 5 Reasons - Why are Chatbots are Important for your Business?

Here are some tips so that you can build a chatbot that compliments your brand:

• Research on the type of character you would like your bot to showcase.
• Find a name that is catchy and helps in defining the character.
• Give your bot strong opinions and showcase them in communication.
• Use character specific traits and quirks like biting fingernails to indicate a worrier (can be used to suggest a bot thinking)
• Identify mannerisms of the character you want to portray. Try taking notes on the behavior of people in malls and coffee shops for reference.

You can create a bot for your brand by simply following these two phases. If you already have already defined a brand identity then you can simply skip to the second step and set up your chatbot’s character. If you need our help or want us to make one for you then feel free to get in touch.