Blog and News > marketing > Quizzes and knock-knock jokes: our best chatbots and why they worked
Quizzes and knock-knock jokes: our best chatbots and why they worked
It’s no secret that we love chatbots here at CANDDi.
We’ve explained our process for turning them into a data-capturing machine, but that’s big-picture stuff. Today I want to take a look at the kind of messages we actually use!
When you’re setting up your bots, it’s tempting to follow convention by simply entering the default message “How can I help?” and calling it a job well done.
It’s perfectly serviceable… but it’s also boring!
The only people this will entice are people who already have some burning question or issue.
In order to capture the attention of the (likely much bigger) portion of your visitors who are kind of interested, you need something bold, unique, or funny… or all of the above.
In this blog, we’ll go over some general tips for creating interesting (and more importantly, effective) chatbots. We’ll even include some of our most successful ones!
Chatbot rules to live by
Don’t sacrifice your brand
Your chatbots are an extension of your brand voice, so don’t sacrifice that just for a memorable chatbot!
If you’re a traditional-style financial company, for example, it’s probably not a good idea to write a laid-back chatbot which cracks jokes. Instead, you can create bold and engaging openers which are more in-line with your brand image.
Integrate your live chat with your existing processes
The idea is to get visitors to enter information into the live chat, right? So it’s important to ensure that valuable information is getting used properly.
Many chatbots integrate with your CRM to push information about visitors directly into your lead pages. And even better, CANDDi integrates with most popular live chats to track and identify any visitors who engage!
Track your metrics
As with any customer-facing process, it’s important to track certain metrics to assess how things are going.
The most important things to keep an eye on is the engagement rate (% of people who respond to your initial chat bot) and the subsequent conversion rate these visitors that respond.
Test and improve
Using the aforementioned metrics, try to do as much experimentation as possible! Test new openers or responses to see if you can drive up those conversion rates.
Some live chat tools even allow you to A/B test your chatbots to help you iterate your way to chatbot perfection.
One of ours: an irresistible opener!
What could be more irresistible than the exotic tease of… a knock-knock joke?
That was our thinking behind this little chatbot which we used on our home page: 
It’s a cute and light-hearted opener that we quickly tie-in to the main selling point of our software; we tell you who’s there… (get it?!).
The chatbot worked brilliantly for two reasons; the first being that it simply got a high response rate.
I’m sure you could sit for hours with the world’s knowledge of psycho-analysis to theorize why that is… but for the sake of simplicity, let’s just go with this: people love knock-knock jokes!
The second reason this worked for us is that it quickly and efficiently transmits our fun, laid-back company ethos to our visitors. It set the tone for engagement, and led to some really enjoyable chats, which in turn led to some strong customer relationships!
How we got clever with bots
Now for something a little more complicated; we wanted to create a chatbot to help people decide whether CANDDi was the right tool for them.
We put this one on pages people might visit when they’re trying to get a feel for what we do; product pages, comparison pages, places like that. Here’s the opener:
You might notice that we draw attention to the fact it’s a bot by introducing it as “CANDDiBot”, which goes against the usual efforts to make bots seem as human as possible.
This is actually one of the reasons this gets so many responses; it’s aimed at the type of visitor who doesn’t WANT to talk to a human yet. They’re still deciding if CANDDi is right for them, so don’t want to be pestered by some pushy salesperson.
What follows is a multiple choice quiz which determines whether the visitor would get good value from CANDDi. It took a while to set up; just look at the back end:
But the visitor sees something like this:
This leads to a lot of enquiries because the prospect is reassured by the interactive nature of the chat. CANDDi is right for their specific situation.
We also monitor the answers to these questions to help us during our onboarding process. It gives us a head start, and means we can provide the most relevant and useful information to our new users as soon as possible!
And that’s the end of our little chat about chatbots. If you made it this far, here’s a little reward… a reminder that no matter how clever or witty you think your chatbots are, you’ll never please everyone:
Happy chatting!
