Every chatbot needs a personality and identity, something that makes them easily identifiable while backing up your branding. A chatbot is a direct way for somebody to interact with your business, so your bot’s persona needs to represent your voice, brand, and business identity.
From a targeted audience to bot creativity, here’s how to create your bot persona to keep your customers engaged — and entice new business.
Understand Your Company and Audience
The first step to creating your bot persona is to make sure you have a grasp on your company vision, voice, and goals because all of these are going to affect your bot persona. Is your brand’s long-term vision to be known as the top high-end fashion brand in your area? If so, your bot’s persona needs to fit within that perception.
You also need to take an in-depth look at your target audience, making sure you understand who they are and what they need from your brand. If your ideal audience is made up of millennials/younger generation/etc, your bot should have a more casual tone and might even use slang or expressions that an older audience wouldn’t understand.
Keep It On-Brand
Everything your chatbot says and does need to make sense in light of your brand to help reinforce your branding to customers.
Part of this step is figuring out whether your chatbot will represent an individual or a group of people. If your business is built around just one person, your bot should reflect that person and be a good representation of who they are. For bigger companies that have a full team of employees, the bot should represent the values and mission of the entire brand; a pediatric hospital, for example, might have a bot that’s compassionate and caring. A company with multiple people on staff will need to create a whole new character to represent the brand.
Create a Character
Come up with a character that will reflect your brand to the customers who interact with your bot. Disney, for example, created a Messenger bot called Officer Judy Hopps a few years back. The bot was based on the main character from the Zootopia movie — a crime-solving bunny — and got a lot of engagement from Facebook users. Officer Judy was a creative way to promote the upcoming movie.
Once you have a character in mind (a human or animal with a name and profession), you can work from there to create your chatbot and develop a voice for that persona. Starting with a character is easier than trying to write copy first because your character’s personality will determine what it says and does.
Stay Consistent
Finally, once you’ve decided on a bot persona, be consistent with it long term. If multiple people on your team create content for the bot, make sure they’re all on the same page and follow the same tone of voice, keeping the personality going. Consistency is key to helping your bot persona stay believable, which will bring in more customers for your company.
Learn more about bot personality from Kelly Noble Mirabella.
