What is a ‘goal’?
So what is a goal? According to Merriam-Webster dictionary, a goal is “the end toward which effort is directed.”
Our goal attribution feature can be immensely helpful in creating an effective bot. We define ‘goals’ as indicators of important or crucial points in a bot’s conversation path. By utilizing goal attribution in the structure of your bot(s), you can increase the effectiveness of your bot(s) and overall marketing efforts to help attain your end goal.
Knowing the ultimate goal of your bot allows you to start with a proper framework
When building a bot, knowing the overall purpose is paramount. For specific use cases there are different bot conversation flows that will be most effective. The most common use cases we see are: lead generation, customer support, onboarding/ training, or a combination of the three. For this post I will use these use cases in my examples.
Use purposeful building to capture valuable feedback
Once you know your use case, you want to be strategic in structuring your bot to get you the feedback you need. By ‘feedback’, I am referring to the specific information you are collecting from users engaging with your bot.
For Lead Generation, Customer Support, and Training/Onboarding bots, gaining a user’s contact information is useful. However, there is other information that can be pertinent and beneficial depending on the use case.
For Lead Generation, gaining information about how users are responding to qualifying questions that create a robust user profile is beneficial. This informs and enhances the follow-up process, so you can speak to each user’s specific interests and demographic.
In the example of a Customer Support bot, you may want to create a bot that answers commonly asked questions and routine requests. It is also good practice to allow end users to input novel questions via free text response to be answered by a team member. By capturing this information, you can create a bucket of free text questions, parse through the questions to find similarities and common concerns, and use those insights to enhance your bots to also handle those requests.
Lastly, with Training/Onboarding bots, collect information on the effectiveness of the bot itself in aiding users in their onboarding or training circumstance would be advantageous. In order to do this, adding a poll that allows users to give feedback to on the bot’s performance and helpfulness can make it easy to assess your bot and make changes that will improve the training/onboarding experience for users.
Thus, when building bots keep in mind purposeful building to ensure you collect the information and feedback you desire and the data that would be most beneficial to help you analyze and improve your bot’s performance.
Receive key alerts with goals
Now that we have touched upon the goal of your bot and purposeful building lets discuss how
Goal attribution can further enhance bot effectiveness, by allowing you to set up key points in the conversation flow where you would like to be alerted.
This is great for bots with one purpose, and even more so, for bots that have two or more purposes. For example, a bot that is used for lead-gen may also provide assistance with customer support inquiries as well.
The goal attribution feature allows you to route notification emails coming from the lead-gen bot conversation to your sales personnel while support related requests are routed to your helpdesk team. Goals can just as easily be used to create alerts for Live Chat takeover; alerting your team that an end user has reached a part of the conversation that qualifies them to connect with a live agent.
Not only do goals help you route conversations to the appropriate party, it also allows you to tag users and enhance their profiles with information on the goals they have completed. This makes it easy when reviewing your analytics to determine how users should be prioritized, depending on what goals they have completed.
Goals to segment and target messaging/users
Using these goal attribution tags you can also begin to bucket different users and create user segments. This allows you to organize your users based on specific behaviors and demographics.
After you have created user segments, you can customize bot and message targeting for each specific segment. These tools can obviously be used within Instabot by creating different bots to launch for different user segments, however this can also be leveraged elsewhere. You can export the list of users and use it for additional marketing and sales campaigns.
Thus, having a goal in mind is key to creating an effective bot. This endgame mindset coupled with goal attribution makes for not only a successful bot, this combination also strengthens campaign efforts across your business with the information that is gained.
If you would like to learn more about how to use this tool, feel free to reach out to the team at [email protected].