Sober second thoughts ... is your organization ready for a chatbot?
By: JP Simbandumwe | 1 minute read
A digital customer service platform and chatbot are powerful and potentially very effective tools to add to your communications toolset, but timing is important. An ill-conceived or badly executed implementation can result in a worse rather than a better user experience. We encourage potential clients to conduct their due diligence to determine if their organization is ready to implement this type of tool.
In our experience, the following prerequisites should be met before considering implementing a social care platform and a chatbot:
Your organization has done its homework to create relevant, informative, accurate, and accessible web content that has been verified by testing with real users. If you need help to plan or execute this “homework”, please check out our Human-Centered Research and Design consulting services. While we have noted that in general websites have slipped in importance as a point for the first reference, government websites are still a critical repository of official policy and announcements.
Your organization has a mature social media monitoring and response team and capabilities and the support to increase resources if necessary.
Your communications team has good documentation of the most common issues that are encountered by users from previous emails, social media posts, and call center interactions.
Your organization has a functional call center
Your leadership team is committed to making a sustained investment in digital social service because they either want the cost savings or it is regarded as an important prerequisite to attaining the organizational communications mandate.