Research and prioritize scenarios
Before you create content for your conversational user experience (CUX), you need to understand what your customers want and need from your conversational experience. To do that, you can use data analysis and brainstorming techniques to identify and rank the most relevant and impactful scenarios for your CUX.
Analyze existing data sources
Start by reviewing your data and knowledge about how your customers interact with your brand. This might include website visits, blog traffic, social media engagement, search data, support calls, or any other source that's relevant to your users. Look for areas of high volume, high user engagement, or any other information that might relate to the purpose of the conversational experience. You want to find out all the potential topics that your CUX could handle.
Brainstorm possible scenarios
After analyzing the data, brainstorm scenarios that you could cover with your CUX. Think carefully about your current user experiences, what the data tells you about those experiences, and topics that could help answer your most common questions. You might start by answering these questions:
- Who is the target audience for the conversational experience?
- What are your business goals?
- What are your biggest challenges?
- What are your users' biggest pain points?
- What are the priorities for your business?
At this stage, don't worry about narrowing down or prioritizing your scenarios, or about current resources and timeline. Make a list of all the topics you might want to cover with your CUX at some point. It can help at this point to dig into these scenarios and think through how users would interact with the CUX in each case.
Rank scenarios by impact
When you've finished brainstorming, the next step is to rank and choose a few scenarios to build in your conversational experience first. The key to this step is to start small in terms of number of scenarios, but significant in terms of impact.
Don't discard your brainstorming once you're done! Those ideas are the building blocks for future content development, and they act as a basis for your innovation roadmap.
When you're ranking your initial scenarios, consider the data that you analyzed and your answers to the questions about business goals, challenges, and priorities.
Test, monitor, and improve
The process of scenario development should never be stagnant. Even after you've started creating content for your CUX, continue to monitor usage and analyze data to make sure that it addresses the most important, relevant, or impactful user scenarios. Update your content plan over time as needs change.
Examples of scenario development
Here are two examples of how these steps can be applied to develop scenarios for conversational experiences. In each example, available data is analyzed, possible scenarios are brainstormed, and then a list of ranked scenarios is created based on balancing the business goals with the scenarios that have the biggest impact on users.
Example 1: Customer support agent for a mobile phone retailer
Available data:
- Questions asked on social media channels
- Traffic data from the frequently asked questions (FAQ) page on the website
- Call volume to customer support
Brainstormed scenarios: Questions about mobile phone features, pricing questions, troubleshooting mobile data issues, troubleshooting automatic factory reset error, ordering replacement parts, repair services, wireless carrier compatibility, billing issues, new phone release information, shipping information, service outages, warranty information.
Prioritized scenarios:
- Troubleshooting mobile data issues
- Troubleshooting automatic factory reset error
- Repair services
Why these scenarios were prioritized:
- The first and second scenarios generate the most customer support call volume.
- The third scenario has the highest traffic on the FAQ website.
Example 2: Personal shopping assistant for clothing brand
Available data:
- Past sales data
- Current industry trends
- Traffic data from the FAQ page on the website
Brainstormed scenarios: Clothing recommendations, accessory suggestions, completing purchases, returns and exchanges, size and fit information, current discounts and sales shipping information, what's new, store locations, store hours, inventory information
Prioritized scenarios:
- Clothing recommendations
- Size and fit information
- Returns and exchanges
Why these scenarios were prioritized:
- The first scenario is the main reason for creating the shopping assistant.
- The second and third scenarios have the highest traffic on the FAQ website.