Are you familiar with the conversation designer yet?

With the rise of social media, new professions have arisen. Social media marketers and community managers are now impossible to imagine business without. They are roles that require specific skills, where you not only have to be good with text and image, but also understand exactly how the different social media channels work and how you seek and maintain contact with your customers.

With the rise of chatbots and other so-called conversational interfaces (think of Siri on the iPhone or the smart speakers from Google and Amazon), demand is arising again for people with a specific package of skills. After all: training a chatbot with frequently asked questions is still relatively easy, but if you expand your chatbot further with a function such as conversations then it already becomes a good deal more complicated. And then you also have to think about your chatbot's personality.

In recent months in particular the term ‘conversation designer’ therefore pops up more and more often. The names ‘chatbot editor’ or ‘AI writer’ are also used, incidentally, but in my view ‘conversation designer’ covers it best. Conversation design is literally about designing the conversations people have with, for example, a chatbot. And in doing so, three specific elements come up that you have to know about.

1. Personality

For a pleasant conversation a chatbot's personality has to be consistent. That starts with the choice of things such as the name, the gender and the avatar, but then also concerns its way of talking. Does it come across at one moment in a conversation as an approachable expert trying to help you as well as possible, but is it distant and formal a little later? Then something is going wrong.

A conversation designer, who is therefore really specialised in applying chatbot technology in practice, can think about the personality and the strategy behind it, and make sure this comes back everywhere in the chatbot. In both its appearance and the answers it gives.

2. Copywriting

At the moment it is the case that everything a chatbot says was once written by someone and then taught to the chatbot. With developments in the field of artificial intelligence that will change over the years, but for now someone still has to enter the answers a chatbot gives manually. Ultimately that is therefore a matter of copywriting.

Writing texts for a chatbot is something entirely different from writing for a website or social media, though. The texts are not only a lot shorter, but also much more direct and personal. You write responses, not standalone texts. Not every copywriter is equally good at that, which is why it is good to have a specialist and this is the conversation designer.

3. User experience

You should not underestimate a chatbot's user experience. Does the chatbot send a message itself when you start a conversation and so steer the conversation in a particular direction, or does the user on the other end of the line start the conversation? And how does a chatbot respond when it does not understand the answer? And is that different the first time from the second? These are all choices you have to make. There is no directly right or wrong choice, but ultimately you do want to make the choices that suit your chatbot's objectives. You want as many satisfied users as possible, after all.

An important part of the user experience is also the structure of conversations. In a conversation the chatbot gives several answer options that all result in a different outcome. That outcome can again be a question with several answer options, which means you effectively get a kind of decision tree. Designing a coherent, purposeful and user-friendly conversation can be quite a challenge. As the maker of those conversations you not only have to be able to handle the content of the messages, but also understand how to build a logical ‘flow’ for your user and keep an overview of it yourself.

The expectation is that the role of conversation designer will pop up more and more often in the coming years and also become more important. That does not mean you have to employ one tomorrow, but it is useful to look now at who within your organisation has it in them to fill that role when you get going with a chatbot.

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