Why your chatbot's first message is so important - Blog by Oswald.ai

Introducing yourself is the first step in any conversation with a person you have never met before. Why should a chatbot be any different? A good introduction message can help users navigate through the conversation and especially users who have never talked to a bot before. In this short blog, we are going to dissect a good introduction message and explore why they are so important.

Your chatbot’s personality

It is important to work on the system persona or the personality of your chatbot because users automatically assign a personality to a chatbot. If you don’t assign a personality to your digital assistant, your customers will do it for you. Second, conversational designers need an established personality as a guideline to write responses.

To establish this personality of a chatbot, we usually recommend conducting a workshop with a company and include their marketing department. We also suggest giving it a name and a face. When the user then enters the conversation, they can get to know a chatbot that correctly reflects the company values and branding.

New chatbot users

This part is especially important for people that are not familiar with chatbots yet. Often times, people don’t know which questions to ask a chatbot and type a long message containing multiple questions. It is important to educate the user first, so the chatbot is able to recognize all the needed intents from a singular question.

Provide some topics of conversation

One other tip, to make sure the user can be helped quickly and efficiently is to add some quickreplies containing the topics the bot is the most familiar with. These can reflect the frequently asked questions of a service, the most popular items in a salesbot, and more.

If you combine all of these elements, your introduction message might look something like this:

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Some other tips

Try to make the introduction message of your chatbot short and sweet to avoid a TL;DR reaction. The size of the introduction message (or any answer in the chatbot) shouldn’t exceed the available space in the widget. Nothing is more annoying than having to scroll up to see the full introduction.

So, if you’re ready to build your own chatbot and reach your client in the most fitting way, you can start today. Not sure how? Reach out to the Oswald team here and we will go over the possibilities with you! 🤓