June Question of the Month: Chatbots
Every month, Design Pickle emails their community a question about marketing, technology, or business trends using the one-click YesInsights survey tool. The question for June revolves around one of the newest trends in marking right now — chatbots!
The results of this survey were surprisingly mixed! Only 38% of those surveyed are planning to use an automated chat service in the next six months, while 24% of people admit that they don’t even know what a chatbot is.
10% know that they are absolutely not participating in automated chat anytime soon, while 29% are interested in bots but have no plans to implement one into their system anytime soon.
An overwhelming 23 out of 33 comments expressed uncertainty about chatbots. That means that only 10 people – about 30% of those surveyed – have made a firm decision to use a chatbot or to avoid automating their customer service altogether.
That also means that 70% of people want more information about chatbots.
Even those who reported that they already use a chatbot in their marketing admit they are still testing the waters of automated response.
The idea of chatbots (originally coined as “chatterbots”) has been around since 1994 – more than two decades ago. So why are we still in the dark about automated response programs?
Notable Comments
Survey Performance Analysis
Survey Performance Analysis
Almost 30% of the Design Pickle community opened the survey email, which was about the same open-rate as the last (and, ironically, the first ever) Question of the Month.
Of the 3,750 people, 140 clicked a response to answer the survey. This number is lower than hoped for, but again, is comparable to the results of our prior Question of the Month campaign. A couple ways to encourage a higher click-through rate:
- Familiarize the audience with the topic. Like the 69% of responders who felt uncertain about bots, some people may feel so unarmed with knowledge about the topic that they felt too discouraged to even participate in the survey. The next campaign email could have been written with a bit more information – or links to resources that have more information – about the survey topic.
- Have clear answer choices. It’s a great idea to customize answers to a niche target audience (like those in the tech world), but a reader who doesn’t understand a reference like Skynet may feel confused and discouraged to submit an answer. Also, be sure your answer choices aren’t so specific that they exclude other possible choices. A great rule of thumb is to have a positive, neutral, negative, and unknowing response choice for each survey.
Discussion and Recommendations
We received a lot of feedback in the survey asking for Design Pickle’s chatbot recommendation. Our marketing team is currently using ManyChat to automate our Facebook messaging:
With ManyChat, you can set up a welcome message to automatically trigger when a chat is opened for the very first time. You can also set up a default reply to certain keywords, create customized pop-ups and banners, and even set up a main menu in your messenger app that acts as a mini resource guide available 24/7.
The main menu is at the bottom of the messenger app. You can customize the answer choice buttons to open another website, call a phone number, or insert a customized default reply.
Design Pickle is also proud to announce a very new chatbot the team recently launched – the Slackbot! The Slackbot is an automated system that allows a user to upload request details right into Slack, a chat app for businesses and professional organizations.
