FAQ Bot News - Kia ora, hello and welcome: Crafting the perfect FAQ Bot Welcome Message

With a well-crafted welcome message you can make a great first impression, let your customers know what to expect and begin to guide the conversation. It’s an opportunity to make your customers’ chatbot experience easy and delightful. So, what makes a good welcome message for your FAQ Bot?

A little bit of personality

Every chatbot should have a personality, and the welcome message is a great place to introduce it. Your FAQ Bot’s name and the way it uses language and other conversation elements provide the first clues to its personality – and the opportunity to surprise and delight your customers.

Education New Zealand’s FAQ Bot, Tohu, uses a te reo Māori name and greeting in its welcome message. This is one way Tohu indicates it’s from and of Aotearoa/New Zealand – an important factor for Tohu’s users, prospective students looking at New Zealand as a study destination.

Managing expectations 1 – are you real?

It’s sometimes hard to tell whether you are talking to a person or a chatbot, especially when live chat (with a person) interfaces look just like chat bot interfaces. Use your welcome message to make it clear. Tohu uses the robot emoji plus the word chatbot to set that expectation.

Tohu’s welcome message also lets users know that it’s still learning, and may not know all the answers – a little humility in a chatbot goes a long way.

Managing expectations 2 – what do you know?

Another way your FAQ Bot’s welcome message can help set and manage expectations is to mention its domain of expertise, like Tui does.

By being specific like this, the likelihood that your customer will ask a random question your bot isn’t trained to deal with is reduced (and for those random questions that do still make it through, pre-configured chit-chat or web search fallback can help).

Direct conversation with example questions

FAQ Bot’s second welcome message is configurable with buttons, which gives your customers a clear steer on how to get started, and helps them get straight to the most common questions and actions – without any typing!

If your customers are new to chatbots this is an easy way to help them get used to the format and how to interact – they can try pushing buttons before they have to formulate a question.