Chatbot Scripts: Step by Step Guide for Conversational UI

Chatbots are now among the most preferred communication channels between customers and brands. 

However, not many businesses get their chatbot strategy right and therefore fail to provide the kind of experience needed by customers. 

In fact, the majority of AI bots sound less human and more robotic which dilutes the fun of conversations.    

With 63% of customers preferring a chatbot to reach out to a brand, it’s important to write scripts in a way that makes the bot conversational in nature.  

When the script is well-written and thought-through, the bot will always give relevant answers to customer queries and guide them through conversations without any hiccup. 

For that reason, you should focus on how to write chatbot scripts so that your business is able to deliver a more humanized and improved experience to customers.  

9 Steps on How to Create Chatbot Scripts for More Humanized Experience 

Scripts are easily the most important element of a chatbot. They decide whether a chatbot sounds human or robotic. In fact, conversational AI chatbots with well-written scripts always feel like humans and can engage in conversations on any scale. However, writing a good bot script is an art that you need to master to ensure value to customers.    

There are different steps that can help you understand how to write bot script to deliver a more humanized experience to customers.  

1. Define the Purpose of the Bot
2. Give Your Bot a Personality 
3. Build the Dialogue Tree 
4. Introduce Your Chatbot 
5. Personalize the Conversation
6. Guide Your Users Proactively
7. Match the Script with User Sentiment 
8. Add Emotion Appeal 
9. Deliver Hybrid Experience with Human Handover

Let’s look into each of the ways in detail; 

1. Define the Purpose of the Bot 

A good chatbot is one that is often created with a specific purpose in mind. 

Whether to provide support to customers, guide them through the website, or take orders, there has to be a clarity of goals for your AI chatbot to perform optimally and handle queries efficiently.   

Similarly, having targets in mind can help you design the bot flow and conversational scripts accordingly to ensure meaningful interactions with customers at each step of the way. 

Tips to define the purpose of the bot

• Outline the role – In order to create relevant chatbot scripts, you first need to outline what kind of roles the bot is expected to perform and what kind of questions it needs to answer. You need to define whether you need a chatbot for lead generation or for marketing.  
• Anticipate the scenario – It’s important to first imagine the expected scenarios for bots and then create the scripts accordingly as this will help frame the responses based on the predicted customer questions.   

2. Give Your Bot a Personality 

The scripts will decide the kind of personality you want the chatbot to have. It will also decide the attitude and behavior of the bot for a particular scenario. 

The tone of your bot needs to align with the brand image you want to portray in front of the world. 

After all, customers always find it easy to relate to chatbots that have a unique voice.  

So, before creating the scripts, you should also do a bit of research with chatbot trends to get an idea of how others are playing the AI game and how can you stand out from the crowd.  

How to give your bot a personality?  

• Decide the approach – When you create the bot persona, you need to decide whether it will have a professional or casual approach during conversations as this will help it handle queries successfully. 
• Settle on the voice – Should you bot answer in active or passive voice is something you need to be clear from the word go as it will ensure relevant responses and right attitude for conversations.
• Humoristic or firm attitude – How would you expect the bot to respond in the face of a situation whether through humor or firmness should always be a key aspect in writing a chatbot script.     

3. Build the Dialogue Tree 

The best of chatbot scripts are always crafted based on the expected conversation flows between the users and the bot. 

By building the dialogue tree, you would be aware of the sequence of questions customers might have and the supposed answer the bot needs to flesh out.   

The purpose of building a conversation flow is to follow chatbot best practices, know the end goal of users, and then create the script based on that to ensure relevant responses most of the time.   

The dialogue tree above is a good example of how to get your chatbot conversational flow right. 

Best practices to build a dialogue tree

• Consider the most common stories – Conversational scripts need to account for the most common stories so that different versions of conversations can be handled easily and the right responses are offered in most situations. 
• Prepare different versions of an answer – Make sure your bot is fed with different versions of an answer to sound more like a human and less like a robot to customers while responding to their queries.    
• Work on the sequence of dialogue – Once you know the stories, you need to work on the sequence of the dialogue so that the bots are able to offer the appropriate answers for specific queries. 

4. Introduce Your Chatbot 

From the very start, customers deserve to know whether they are talking with a robot or a human. You should never keep them in the dark on this issue. 

Plus, this will also set the tone of conversations as then the nature of queries might also be less complex. 

For that reason, you need to introduce the bot to the user and ‘list down the services’ or ‘the kind of help’ it can provide. 

You’re also supposed to introduce the bot in a way that gives a complete idea of what the bot is intended for, quite like the conversational script sample below; 

“Hi, My Name is Eva. I am a customer service bot. May I help you with a product search, order status check, etc.”  

How to introduce the chatbot?

• Get the chatbot’s greetings right – You can make an instant connection with customers and draw them in a conversation with chatbots for marketing if you have devised friendly chatbot greetings. 
• Speak to customers at a personal level –  When you introduce the bot to the user, the first priority should always be to speak at a personal level as this can work as an inviting message and might bring them in immediately. 

5. Personalize the Conversation

Whether you’re marketing a product or selling a service, personalization always works with customers. 

And when your customer service chatbot is able to personalize the response, users are obviously impressed and feel a sense of specialness. 

And when talked to at a personal level, customers always show a better response compared to other scenarios.   

So, if you are writing a conversational script, make sure you consider personalizing your message. 

How to personalize the conversation? 

• Create personalized greetings – You most likely have the customer’s details like name, location, gender, etc, and you can use them to address them and get the conversation going. 
• Chatbot analytics – it’s always a good step to use the historical data of customers, or their browsing history and then use the information to add an element of personalization. 

6. Guide Your Users Proactively

It’s your bot that needs to guide the conversations and direct customers to the next step. 

Make sure the bot is proactive in approach when it comes to getting the interactions to move in the desired direction. 

If there is a proper guidance in a step-by-step manner, it will always ensure a delightful chat experience for users.

For example, if you’re a SaaS company aiming to get customers to know your product, the chatbot response and scripts should be something on these lines; 

“Looking for a quick product demo? Hello, I am your customer service bot. Type “book a product demo” or type “take me through the product”.

Tips to guide users proactively

• Have the next step ready for users – Your chatbot scripts need to be crafted to drive customers to the next step through proper guidance and help. They need to be as clear and concise as live chat scripts tend to be.  
• Lay down clear guidelines to follow   – Visitors to your website might feel clueless and confused if the chatbot does not give clear guidelines and this can also make the conversations meander along wrong lines.      

7. Match the Script with User Sentiment 

Even when users know they’re talking with a chatbot, they expect appropriate responses to some extent. And when the response is not relevant, it might put them off. 

With the chatbot sentiment analysis feature getting advanced by the day, it would be a mistake to not consider the emotional appeal in the message.  

Keeping this in mind, you need to ensure the chatbot script aligns with the user sentiment for a given situation. 

Like for example, when a user is happy, the script should script reflect the same.

And if the user is displeased, make sure the bot’s tone is firm and professional.

Suppose, if the user shows interest in buying a product, the conversation script sample should have an element of excitement, like “Great!” Let me show you the product.” 

And when the user is there with some complaint, a good chatbot script example and response could be like, “Oho, sorry to hear about that. Let me fix that for you.”     

8. Add Emotion Appeal 

Lack of emotions can make the conversations feel drab and boring.

Even when users talk to a bot, they expect a certain level of expressions through words, emojis, etc. Without that, it feels like talking to a robot.  

To avoid that situation, you should create bot scripts in a way that shows empathy, compassion, gratitude to the situations where it’s needed.  

For example, if you were to handle a customer not happy with your product, avoid a robotic or standard chatbot script response like that; 

“Kindly give us the product detail and let us look into that.” 

The right response for such a scenario could be something along these lines; 

Sorry to hear about that. We regret you have to face this situation. Let us fix the problem quickly so that you get the best out of our products.” 

Or; 

“Oh, we feel bad about this. But worry not. We’re gonna fix this quickly. Rest assured of a good product in quick time.” 

9. Deliver Hybrid Experience with Human Handover

No chatbot could ever be 100% accurate in every situation. 

There will always be scenarios when the bot might feel unable to handle the customer query or feel clueless about the right responses. 

For such cases, you should think of delivering a hybrid experience with human handover and live chat software at the right time. 

It is important to incorporate the human handover as part of your conversation flow if you believe that the situation needs to be managed by human support.  

The conversational scripts need to transfer the conversation to human agents in cases where the conversation goes beyond simple scenarios and needs actual assistance.   

Chatbot Scripts for Most Common Use Cases 

Chatbots are a multi-utility tool capable of serving a variety of purposes across industry verticals. They can add value to different aspects of customer communication whether for sales, marketing, or customer service. The best thing, you can easily find read-made chatbot scripts and customer service script templates for the most common usages and meet your business goals successfully.

Here are some chatbot scripts for common uses cases;  

• Lead Generation – Use the chatbot template for lead generation to collect user data, understand the customers better, pre-qualify leads and drive leads effortlessly.  
• Marketing – You can give your business a much-needed boost with a chatbot template for marketing and use the pre-built script to ensure great conversations with customers. 
• Customer Support – Get the most out of every conversation with users using a customer support chatbot template and ensure value at every step of the journey. 
• Pricing – Leverage the script of the pricing query chatbot template to handle customer questions efficiently and easily guide visitors with the right product and pricing info. 

Add Value to Customer Conversations with the Right Chatbot Scripts 

The conversational ability and flow of your chatbot will entirely depend on the types of scripts you have written for it. And to write a good script, you first need to be aware of what customers expect of your business and what kind of responses they like. This will help the bot deliver accurate responses in different types of situations.  

However, the most important thing is to create human-sounding scripts and ensure a relevant and meaningful conversation experience for users. When this happens, you’re sure of giving customers the kind of human experience they always covet while talking to a bot.