Creating the visual identity of a chatbot
A chatbot is an artificial version of a very natural human experience: talking. Therefore, taking a human-centric approach is crucial. And when the goal of a chatbot is to replace live-chat… Well, that’s a challenge 💪
The users’ perception of your brand and customer service is based on how they are treated. So creating a chatbot should be treated with the same attention and care as when hiring a Customer Interaction/Support Agent. Because just like them, the chatbot is, in fact, your brand representative while interacting with your customers.
Nailing the Tone Of Voice
Besides helping the customers, as a company, it’s very important that everyone shares the same tone of voice towards them. And this includes the product itself, advertisement, sales, Customer Support team and, of course, the chatbot.
It wasn’t our goal to have the chatbot mimicking human interaction. The goal was to be able to provide 24/7 support to our customers, something that it’s not possible with a live-chat, not for Doccle at least. I know there are companies that have Customer Agents in different time zones so that all the customers can have non-stop live support. That wasn’t an option for us.
It was also very important for us to don’t leave space for doubts on our customers that they would be talking to a chatbot, and not a person like they were used to.
When I was asked to create the avatar for our chatbot I immediately pitched the idea to give it more than that. The chatbot doesn’t need to live only inside a platform or a product. Social media assets and advertisement are great ways to give it more life and increase our brand recognition.
“Clear content, simple navigation, and answers to customer questions have the biggest impact on business value. Advanced technology matters much less.”
Jakob Nielsen from the Nielsen Norman Group
Creating a persona
As already said, first and foremost, how your service is perceived will depend on the interaction/conversation between customer and support. And this was the base to start developing our visual direction.
Name
We started by choosing a name. We felt strongly that the visual would work in favour of the name, and not the other way around.
Doccle being an administration platform with a very geek and some nerd elements on the team, (love y’all ❤), we had two sides on the table. Names going towards documentation and paperwork and other names going to old school bots 🖖.
We settled with Doccy. Being a reference to DOCuments and of course DOCCle.
A nice tip that I saw during my research was going for names that will play in your brand’s advantage like, for example, self-descriptive names or names that contain keywords. That’s what we tried to do and I believe that we made a good call 😀
With the name chosen, we were ready to start creating a persona that would help to build strong connections with our users and feel more like an extension of our team. By nailing the tone of voice and creating a rich persona, this would help to reduce the workload on human employees, which is actually the goal of most chatbots.
Avatar
As previously stated we wanted to be clear that on the other side was a bot and not a person. But we also wanted to give some humanistic visual cues to the avatar so that people could connect with it.
For us, the visual cues were glasses. We believe that when someone or something has all the answers it was to wear glasses. Right? 🤓
Adding the glasses, or other human characteristics, helps the chatbot to be more relevant and also provides a fun experience to the human on the other side of the conversation.
It’s human behaviour to project human traits onto almost everything,
“…thinking of a nonhuman entity in human ways renders it worthy of moral care and consideration”
This is called anthropomorphize. Super interesting article, you can read it here.
We had all kinds of debates.
Should the chatbot have a gender?
Should it be an “it”?
Should it be a document with glasses?
Should we give arms to the document?
Should it just be a blob of colour? Not looking like anything at all. A blob of colour with glasses!
Answers to these questions will always depend on the company itself, the tone of voice and the visual direction that you want to go with the chatbot’s avatar.
We sketched a bunch of ideas and one immediately felt right 😊
That happy robot “looking” at us just “told” us “Hi, I’m Doccy! How can I help you?” (We really couldn’t help but anthropomorphize…)
Using the Persona Method really helped us to develop the character of the avatar and use it throughout our product.
Applications
You can now find Doccy on our website, giving you all the updates on our platform. You can also find it on social media, bringing all the good news such as new partners on Doccle. On our team’s page, Doccy lets you know what drives it and some personal interest. Just like the rest of the team 😁!
Doccy will celebrate the Belgium holidays with you, and you’ll even get to meet its parents!
I hope this will help you create your chatbot!
Keep in mind that
Doccy was the result of a great team effort.
From training Doccy to nail the tone of voice and be able to answer the users' questions. To the French translations. To great rounds of feedback and brainstorming.
It was really an awesome project to work on and I just hope you like it as much as we do ❤
