So, you are finally making the move from a traditional online survey to a conversational survey, now all you need to do is figure out HOW to actually create a conversational survey. I don’t mean technically create it, as Wizu has taken care of that to make it as simple as possible. But even with a simple editor you still need to get your head around creating the right tone and approach and how to inject some more conversational aspects to your question sets.

A true conversational User Interface is a chatbot experience that will respond in way similar to if you were interacting with another human. Humanizing your chatbot is a great way to make the experience more enjoyable and more personal.

Let’s look at the basic principles of conversational surveys.

If you are having a conversation with a person and they express an opinion the first thing you will usually do is acknowledge them. In a more formal scenario when you are asking for feedback you might show some gratitude for an answer. Just by having some basic reactions like ‘Thank’s for that’ or ‘Good to know thanks’ just lets the respondent know you are listening. They also help move the conversation along without it just being non-stop question after question.

If a customer is expressing satisfaction or dissatisfaction, then it might be suitable for you to express a more relevant response such as ‘That is great to hear’ or ‘I am very sorry to hear that’. This could be used on scale or rating questions or you could even add relevant follow up statements based on the sentiment expressed in open text answers.

Wizu allows you to auto react with Bot ‘Flow’ messages. Simply tick the option within a slider, rating or Emoji scale question and bot will alternate between different messages depending on the score. You can update these default messages at the bot level and can also set your own reactions manually for each question. Most other question types also allow you to manually set positive and negative reactions or you can use routing to direct the respondent to a different message or question based on their response.

Conversational surveys also give you the opportunity to break up your questions. Try adding something like ‘Now I’d like to talk to you about your motivation for buying the product’. This informs the respondent the direction of the conversation as you would in a face-to-face conversation.

You should also keep the respondent updated on where you are at in the conversation. ‘I just have a couple more questions’ or ‘Finally, I just want to talk about your delivery experience’ etc allows them to understand where they are at in the process. Wizu has the option of a progress bar which can be enabled and disabled in the

If a question requires a little more thought from a respondent, then offer some explanation. For example. ‘I am going to ask you to rate some areas of our service. It is really important for us to know so we can identify what we are doing well and what we can improve’. This type of message also helps the respondent know the reason you are asking and the importance of their feedback.

One of the key elements of creating a convincing bot is to ensure it has personality. Without a personality it is difficult for a bot to connect with the respondent. The personality needs to match the identity of your brand and take into account the context of where the conversation is taking place. If this is a patient experience survey at a hospital, then the bot will have a different personality to one that is collecting feedback for a music festival for example.

Non-verbal responses like emojis and GIFs can help convey an emotion which might be difficult to represent in text. It also helps to try to use a variety of greeting and responses. If your bot says ‘Hi’ at the start of every conversation or responds with ‘OK’ after every interaction, then this doesn’t feel very human. Wizu can automatically rotate greetings and reactions using a set of options to ensure the bot is varying its responses. You can edit these default responses at the bot level under ‘Chat Messages’.

You can also set the speed of reaction time of your bot allowing you to set how fast or slow your bot reacts or asks questions to make it more human like. Also when creating your bot you can use the design to bring it to life. Rather than just using a logo try using a face. This could be a human face or a cartoon face. You could even use an animated GIF to have your bot blinking or moving. All these little things help give your bot a personality which can only improve the overall engagement of the survey.

Not every response is positive and negative so sometimes you might want to provide a more generic reaction or simply just break up questions with a quick statement. The following phrases but be used as statements between questions or reactions to more neutral comments.

• OK, thanks.

• I see.

• Thanks for that.

• Thank you for that response.

• Interesting.

• Good to know.

• I appreciate your feedback.

These can be enabled and disabled on your chosen Wizu chatbot.

There are a number of AI options available from simply running real-time spell checks to routing by sentiment and automatically probing around certain topics. Don’t hesitate to get in touch with our customer support team if you need help getting this set up.