How to build trust in a chatbot

Designing an emotional connection with the user

There’s been much discussion concerning the importance of building trust in business, both towards customers and in the internal relationships at work. As a business, you probably operate in a digital landscape where there’s a lot of competition between services, and trust is a key factor in creating a competitive advantage. In recent years, the popularity of chatbots has exploded due to many promising advantages for companies and users. Trust has been shown to have a positive effect on sales, profit, and turnover. Creating a foundation of trust isn’t only beneficial to your brand, but to your revenue as well.

So, what’s the best way of conveying trust through chatbots? As it turns out, I’ve already looked into how to convey trust through a chatbot interface. Here’s how!

What is trust exactly? It’s explained in many different ways and there’s no universal definition of the word. Trust is explained to be something cognitive, emotional or moral, or a combination of the three. It’s an ability we’ve had for a long time, which is built into our genes and on a biological level controlled by the brain chemical oxytocin. We humans are not actively thinking about how much we trust someone, it’s rather a ‘gut feeling’ that is created as a result of several different factors. I’ve summarised these factors into four different categories.

The four factors of trust
Chances of forming a relationship built on trust with humans will increase if you apply these four factors.

Things to consider when designing chatbots
How a user perceives a chatbot is a result of multiple different factors.

For example, every chatbot is going to exist in a particular context. Will it be used for buying plane tickets or function like customer support, will it be used on the web or on the phone, will it be used in groups or alone? Think: where, when, how, what, why and who.

Another thing that we should take into account is the relationship between the user and chatbot, both how it is today and how it will evolve. We can consider the bot as an individual who interacts with humans, which means that the bot’s ‘personality traits’ will affect the experience. Surely the majority of us would like to have a pleasant and smooth discussion with someone who’s friendly, respectful and interested in what we have to say.

In addition to this, we should not forget the importance of the graphical user interface. A text-based chatbot is a hybrid between a Conversational User Interface and a Graphical User Interface so it’s important to reflect over how the user should interact with the GUI.

So, what should you take into account when designing a trustworthy chatbot? Here are some tips for bot-builders who wants to create an excellent base for trust. I have grouped them by the four factors of trust.

Respect the user’s time — Don’t add unnecessary fluff to the conversation.

Be friendly — Caring means to never have a judgmental approach, to always be respectful, and to be positive toward your users.

Give the user a way to quickly access important elements — Use persistent elements for functions that users want to reach at all times, this creates consistency and shows that you have the user in mind.

Listen to your user — Do not request input from the user and then disregard it. If you ask for it, use it. By listening you’re showing that you value their input which is an important factor in creating a pleasant conversation.

Remember your conversations — A foundation of being competent and a proof that you’ve listened to the user is to remember what’s been said. Let the user be able to refer to earlier dialogues.

Customize — Make the experience personalized for all users.

Let the users behave like humans — We want a conversation that feels natural. This is done by letting users behave similar to human conversations, so strive towards understanding non-verbal input and other things humans will use in chats with each other.

Observe your context — Control the entire journey by accessing such data that can make you understand the user's point of view.

Know your limits — Aim high but focus on quality instead of quantity for a better experience. A bot can, for instance, have open answers where users have full access to the keyboard and can write anything to the bot. Or it can have closed answers, where answering options are limited to a few. It can be tempting to go for open answers but I would recommend to only use open answers if you are sure that you can handle them.

Find the need — One component of showing understanding is to figure out the core issue you should solve. The users may not always be able to articulate their core needs, but try to figure out the one problem you need to solve and do that well in order to add value to the user.

In order to figure out how to build trust in bots, we need to go back to basics and see the psychology in what creates trust. We, as humans work the same regardless of the medium. When it comes to conversational UI’s, trust is important in order to build an emotional connection with the user. Have in mind though that bots have many advantages, but they will not always be the right solution to your problems. If creating a bot will match your business needs then these guidelines will hopefully help you create that desirable connection that puts your business in front of the competition.

Related posts:

Journalism has gone and continues to go on a decline as many people now see journalism as fake news or heavily biased news. The public has always relied on Journalists to report neutral factual…

Un papel amate y este antiquísimo cálamo, asentarán las vociferaciones de mis perennes emociones. ¡Cuán acertado estuve en oirme y dejar al sol que me acariciara! Coyolxauhqui posó en tus ojos mis…

New findings from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center paint a troubling picture of declining college enrollments.