Ep. 195: Designing human-centered chatbots Ft. Yiz Segall

A poorly designed chatbot can create major friction for website visitors. But get it right, and the impact on the user experience and conversions can be massive. This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, Yiz Segall gets into the nitty gritty details of how to build chatbots. From what his best-performing opening line is, to who should man the chat and how to use chat logs to optimize your landing pages, he provides step-by-step instructions for creating effective chatbots. Yiz knows what he's talking about, having designed hundreds of bots for clients. And he has the results to show for it, with data showing that website visitor-to-lead conversions increase between 6 and 15% once his chatbots are implemented.   Check out the full episode, or read the transcript below, to hear Yiz's advice for designing human-centered chatbots. Resources from this episode: Connect with Yiz on LinkedIn Transcript Kathleen (00:01): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host, Kathleen Booth and today I'm joined by Yiz Segall who is the senior marketing manager at Group 8A. Welcome to the podcast Yiz. Yiz (00:26): Thanks for having me. Kathleen (00:27): Yeah, you're coming from, from far away. You're based in Israel, correct? Yiz (00:31): Yeah, I'm based in Israel. Kathleen (00:34): It's 7:30 AM my time. What time is it where you are? Yiz (00:39): 3:30 PM. Kathleen (00:40): Nice. All right. Well, I love, I love that we're going global and I'm particularly excited about our topic today, which is about creating human centered chatbots. Before we jump into that though, maybe you could tell my audience a little bit about yourself and your background and what you're doing today at Group 8A. Yiz (00:59): So my background is kind of split into a number of different things. I started off in, mostly in my paid acquisition. I started sort of direct figuring things out myself. I was just going along and then I realized that marketing automation had a lot of like power to it. That there's a lot we could do with that, it to make it more efficient. So I started working with that and as I grew that I realized that I needed to develop more content in order to make it work. So I got more into content strategy as well, and I've sort of been keeping my horizons, always open, sort of looking at new things that can not just not so problems per se, but allow me to do the things that I want to do better. And that's sort of also how I got into chatbots as well. And I only really use the technologies that I know that can actually help me at Group 8A, mostly run paid acquisition, but I also do help the sales team with sales automations and with chatbots. And and I help a little bit also with content. Kathleen (02:09): So I have a question and we didn't talk about this before we got on, but I'm going to spring it on you anyway. Do you see there being a connection between paid acquisition and chatbots and explain to me if the answer is yes. Like how you see those two working together? Yiz (02:26): So yeah, I think there is a little bit of a connection between them. And in any case, anytime that you are, that you bring traffic to a website, especially if it's like intent based. So if you're using Google, less so with Facebook, more so with LinkedIn, that's easier to gauge about the intent of the person coming in. And so you can, once you can measure that intent, if that page isn't, isn't really satisfying the intent completely, that's when chatbots can come in and support that. So if they need more information or then that page can provide, or if it's not, or, or if it doesn't really answer their questions, as much as they want it to that, they're covering for a little bit more, a chatbot could definitely come in and really like supplement that and the additional touch to it. And it seems like more conversational is a lot more easier if it's done correctly, it's it feels a lot more like it feels smooth and it feels like a little bit more natural than just reading through a page does. And so it can really help with acquisition as well. Kathleen (03:36): Yeah, it's interesting because I've observed we, so we, in my company you know, I came on as the first head of marketing about six months ago and we started doing paid acquisition campaigns a couple of months back. And I noticed that when we turned them on our bounce rate went up, which didn't surprise me because all of a sudden we're bringing in a completely different type of traffic. You know, and so, and I had a theory that if I turned on a chatbot and, and made it more about helping people quickly find the content they were looking for, that we could decrease that. And I'm still sort of in the middle of that experiment. So I'm wondering if you've ever like, tracked that, do you know, like, can it help with bounce rates? Have you ever tested that? Yiz (04:23): Yeah, actually one of the cases that I ran, one of the experiments I ran recently was just for a campaign for actually, for a...