Convince your users: not the least, but lesser effort

It can be a real struggle: getting your end-users to interact with your VA. We (and research in general) have written about this topic before where we talked about the importance of the task/topic that your VA can help your users with.

More recently, Nadia Abbas (University of Oslo), Asbjørn Følstad and Cato Bjørkli (SINTEF) made another interesting discovery in this paper on the Norwegian municipality chatbot Kommune-Kari: your users will make an estimate of effort compared to other ways of getting their answer.

For example, one participant remarked:

"If [the chatbot] is only available as the small icon in the corner, I would rather use Google, in contrast to [the chatbot] being available on top.”

And another said:

"If it is faster for me to find the needed information without using [the chatbot], I will not use it. It needs to have a time-saving function."

So what does this mean for your VA?

In short? It doesn't have to be the easiest, but it needs to be easier than the other methods your users have to get their information or answers. Concretely, that may mean any of the following:

• It takes less time. Compared to calling and waiting in a queue, this may seem obvious, but it gets less clear when comparing your VA to a website search.

• It takes less clicks. This may sound obvious too, but especially if information could be found in 1-2 clicks on a webpage, your VA should offer that same information in the same or a lower amount of clicks.

• It takes less reading. A pitfall we often see is that the VA delivers the exact same text as an FAQ page on your website. Even though this text may be delivered faster and with fewer clicks, if it still requires the user to read the same amount of words, they may prefer a page instead of a conversation format simply because it requires less scrolling (and is easier to read!). Make sure that your VA can deliver the exact paragraph that your users are asking for. We have the capacity to make many detailed intents, so make use of that!

Eager to start using these insights into your VA project?

Begin by taking a look at your Admin Panel statistics: they can show you the average chat duration, and button clicks. Want to move further beyond that? We got you: check out our content on using Conversation Review below, or reach out to your boost or partner representative.