Writing the perfect welcome message: how to guide your users
Our main goal in any VA conversation is to help the user with their question or task. An important part of that is making sure that the user is understood by the VA - and sometimes this means that we have to guide the user in how they talk with the VA. An example we have all encountered is our VA asking the user to "please keep it short".
But is that really the best way to guide our users? And is the welcome message the best place to do so? These were the questions addressed in the paper by Yeh, Wu, Chang et al. (2022), where they talked about type of guidance, and timing of guidance. What works?
ACM Conferences
How to Guide Task-oriented Chatbot Users, and When
Researchers have argued that chatbots should guide users on how to talk with them. Nevertheless, empirical evidence about what to place in such guidance, and when to deliver it, has been lacking.
Timing & type
Talking about timing of guidance, the paper identified four possible options:
- Welcome message (called service onboarding in the paper).
- Task introduction
- After failure
- Upon request
With regards to type, the paper talks about two broad categories: rules, and examples. Rules are saying things such as "Avoid using abbreviations" and "Dates are DD/MM/YY". Examples, on the other hand, look more like a message saying: "If you want to book accommodation, you can say 'I want a hotel in Amsterdam from 10/1 to 12/1 for 2 people'."
Best practices
So what does that mean, concretely? We can take three broad lessons from the paper for best practice:
- The best Type x Timing combination is to use examples at task introduction. Of course, this means that we need to be able to define our VAs "tasks". If our VA offers accommodation booking, then the task is distinct from the welcome message. But if our VA is an FAQ bot, this distinction may be harder. Even so, examples in the welcome message are likely to be skipped or found irrelevant, and at worst limiting users! So try to delay examples until the point where the user really needs them - at the start of flows, for instance.
- Never use examples after failure. The example is often not specific to the breakdown, and can even feel condescending - "nice that you let me know how to talk to you AFTER I tried...". Rules (e.g. “write dates like DD/MM/YY” ) are much better here, but then you need to know which rule the user 'violated'. If possible, make use of dynamic fallback messaging to let users know why their message failed to register.
- Examples are used as templates - works fast, but your users won't learn. If your users chat with your VA once a year, examples will be great guidance. But if your users are returning often, you may want to use rules to teach them how the VA's 'mind' works.
Eager to start applying this to your VA, but not sure what works best? We got you: have you already started using our A/B testing tool?
Boost.ai
A/B testing, a look at new tools
One of the biggest new features introduced in v11.4 of the admin panel is the A/B testing action. It allows us to try out new flow designs in a controlled way and to gather data on which one performs the best. This has major implications for how we can design and develop our action flows.
