The following practices will help you design a great conversation between your chatbot and your client:

• Transparency
• Avoid using an excess of predetermined links and buttons
• Use an NLP middleware approach
• Include politeness and small talk
• Tolerate typos and slightly ambiguous formulations
• Always include domain specific terminology
• Define your bot's tone
• Keep the number of possibilities limited
• Let the user know when the bot is "thinking" or processing the query

Reducing complicated, confusing processes down to a natural conversation is potentially a huge business opportunity for anyone willing to jump headfirst and create a great user experience. Chatbots are only as smart as the words you feed them. If a bot is too rudimentary, people will lose trust in the company and will feel ignored and unappreciated. UX problems appear when the user deviates from the designed linear flow.

One of the flaws of usual training data generation is that, when you ask somebody to manually create training data for you, they will make an effort to write these sentences correctly, following the spelling and punctuation norms of your language. Even if some errors appear, they will be minimal, because they are trying to do things right —this is, to provide “orthographically right” sentences.

All Machine Learning (ML) engines that work with text can benefit from a solid linguistic background. If they are working in a multilingual environment, the need of a good lexicon (with forms, lemmas and attributes) is overwhelming. Even so, basic features such as Word Embeddings hugely improve when enriched with linguistic knowledge, and if this is not usually applied, is because of a lack of linguists working for ML companies.

A chatbot offers significant advantages: it allows your customer support to be omnichannel —i.e. customers will be able to approach you via written chat, voice chat, email, phone, etc.—; it will save you the costs of hiring many additional employees, while sparing you the need of training agents every time your product changes; your customers’ satisfaction will increase; finally, you will get more and more sales (because well-taken-care-of visitors tend to become loyal and regular customers).

Let’s repeat: more and more people (customers, or prospective customers) prefer eCommerce these days. They have learnt the comfort of buying from their home, without having to take their car or the public transport to personally go and buy at each store. As always, each option has its advantages and disadvantages, but eCommerce has become a common trend now.