By now, we know that digital assistants and chatbots have become a vital tool for businesses looking for innovative ways to increase efficiency and, in most cases, save a few pennies. However, the success or failure of any digital assistant is not just down to the technology that powers them, but also to the employees entrusted to manage them.
In recent years, the ‘bot-manager’ has become its own specialisation for a lot of organisations, however, it is still often a role that is often taken on as a secondary objective for team members. This often means that chatbots may not get all the attention they need and can lead to simple enhancements not being made for days or even weeks.
When embarking on a chatbot or digital assistant it’s vital to consider who will be responsible for maintaining it and do they have the right skills for the job.
So, what skills and traits make a good bot manager?
- Strategic thinking – understanding business goals and KPIs and being able to train the bot to help you
- An Analytical approach – reviewing the bot usage stats and finding insights to drive improvements.
- Technical expertise – your bot manager should have a good understanding of how chatbots work and a bonus would be a good technical understanding when dealing with more complex use cases
- User-focussed – having a good understanding of user experience and your users is vital for building engaging conversations.
- Copywriting – ensuring your bot has a consistent tone of voice in line with your brand.
With such a diverse set of skills required, it’s not surprising that all the responsibilities are sometimes shared between multiple team members. Indeed, larger bots will have dedicated teams of people working on them.
If you’re not fortunate enough to be able to hire a team of bot experts, you may need to look at the team you currently have and find the colleague who has the best skillset and is passionate about expanding their knowledge. This might be the perfect role for a junior member of your team who is keen on some additional responsibility in the team.
As well as the right team member, you also need to have a chatbot infrastructure that will enable success. With EBM, we provide all the tools to make a bot manager’s life as easy as possible. We highlight key areas of high and low performance, allow for seamless deployment from your staging and production environments and let you retrain your bot in a matter of minutes.
As with most things in life, the more you put in, the more you will get out and this is extremely pertinent in the world of chatbots and digital assistants. Investing in specialist bot managers will ensure your use of conversational AI is set up for long term prosperity.