How to become a Conversation Designer and make chatbots and voice assistants more helpful, natural and persuasive

Conversation Design is a new job. The Conversation Designer has to understand both the human and the artificial brain, and he has to use copywriting techniques to make sure that both brains understand each other.

• Computer systems need structured data, so we need to influence users and ensure they give the bot input it can understand.
• Humans need empathy, so we need to write dialogue that’s helpful, natural and persuasive.

Great summary, but what are the skills the Conversation Designer actually needs to make this happen?

At Robocopy we developed an academy and we designed the curriculum for the Conversation Designer. We collaborated with psychologists, behavior designers, copywriters, ux-writers and experienced VUI designers from some of the big 5 tech companies.

Here’s a quick overview of the course — and all the topics Conversation Designers should focus on. (Read about it in detail at

1. Bot Scorecard and Natural Language

In this class, you will learn about the Bot Scorecard and natural language. The Bot Scorecard is a framework that conversation designers use to evaluate and discuss their work.

Since conversation design is a new discipline, we need a common language that we can use to talk about our work. There is no grading system, no way to know if we are doing a proper job. The Bot Scorecard helps with that.

The Bot Scorecard is used to analyze conversations based on

• Personality
• Natural language
• Empathy
• Helpfulness
• Persuasiveness

Using the Bot Scorecard, you will get a better understanding of the quality of your own work. And it also helps when giving feedback to your peers or develop arguments when you present your designs to product owners and management.

In this class, you will learn about the framework and you will learn how to apply it to chatbots and voice assistants. We will look at some examples together, and you will be encouraged to use it evaluate other conversational experience.

This framework will be used throughout the entire course.

2. Creating a Bot Persona

Before you can design a successful conversation for a chatbot or voice assistant, you need to figure out how your bot should talk. In this class you will learn to use psychological frameworks to design a persona that works for your brand, resonates with your audience, and most importantly, establishes the right relationship between the bot and the user.

By focussing on what users want to achieve, we can figure out how the bot persona should relate to them. Should it be obedient, equal or more dominant? Is the bot used for service or sales?

By focussing on the psychological implications of this relationship, we can create a persona and design a standard vocabulary for the bot. Using this bot persona, we can frame the bot in such a way that the users knows what to expect and what to do in order to get a good experience.

Having a good persona that creates a productive human-bot-relationship, not only makes for a good experience, but it also helps us recognize intents better. For example, if the bot says ‘ask me any question’, the user can ask any kind of question and it’s difficult for the bot to recognize all the intents. If the bot says ‘ask me a question about coffee’, it frames the bot in such a way that it influences the user and increases the odds of getting a question in which we can recognize an intent — provided we have indeed trained our bot to know things about coffee. :)

To create a good experience, in this class you will learn how to

• do research on your brand
• do user research on customer jobs
• establish the right psychological relationship between user and bot
• design a standard vocabulary for your bot
• write good introduction messages to frame your bot in the proper way

3. Scenario Development and Conversation Design

In this class you will learn about the 3-act structure, and you will learn how to apply principles from Ancient Greece to your conversation designs.

Most conversations have a similar format. A beginning, a middle part and an ending. However, per topic these structures may vary a little and per type of conversation you are going to need specific copywriting technique. For example, if your user is rather motivated you can keep the dialogue rather straight forward. If your user isn’t that motivated, maybe you want to encourage him to leave a review, then your dialogue needs more persuasive elements.

In this class, we will discuss:

• 3-act structures
• Scenarios for customer service
• Scenarios for sales
• Scenarios for managing emotions
• Fallbacks and error messages

You will then focus on structuring your own scenarios and using them to understand which copywriting techniques to use when writing your dialogue.

From Ancient Greece to chatbots and voice assistants. Time to buckle up!

4. Conversation Design for customer service

One of the first and most common use cases for chatbots is customer service. Traditionally, consumer-focused companies have had to deal with customer service. Most of the interactions used to be via phone, but in the past few years, it has shifted to email, live chat, and social media.

It doesn’t matter which channel you use, live contact is expensive. And since many of the conversations with customers are rather similar, we can automate a lot of generic questions using a chatbot. All simple questions are then handled by chatbot and the more complicated queries are handed over to an agent. This works well, as long as you know how to design good conversations around your customers’ service questions.

During this class we will discuss some of the following topics:

• Structure customer service scenarios
• Ask questions in a specific way to ensure you catch the right intent — and sub-intent
• Use persuasive principles to motivate users to go through a service process
• Confirm the resolution
• Never a dead-end street

You will then incorporate these principles into your own customer service use case.

5. Conversation Design for managing emotions

Customers often reach out to companies when there are frustrated or emotional. Maybe

• they are upset because the flight got canceled
• the product they love just broke
• the service they want to use is not working
• they are nervous to deal with an insurance company
• etc

In this class, you are going to learn how to deal with emotions. We will discuss the escalation-prevention-model in great detail and discuss how we can use to structure our scenarios.

In sum, there are core negative emotions that can lead to undesired behavior. For example, somebody that is angry might become revengeful. There are actual writing techniques that you can apply ensure that you prevent the undesired behavior from happening. In this class, you will learn all the relevant techniques for each and every situation.

• Bad news when the user is to blame (maybe he didn’t pay his bill)
• Bad news when the user is not to blame (maybe mechanical default is causing a delay)

This is a revolutionary model that has been developed by our own behavioral psychologists.

6. Conversation Design for sales and persuasion

Persuasion is important in conversation design. You need to motivate and influence users when they go through complex service dialogues, but you can also use chatbots and voice assistants for persuasive conversations. Maybe you want users to buy a product, book a meeting, fill in a form or engage with the bot more, there are lots of psychological principles you can apply to reach your goals.

You will learn how to structure persuasive scenarios and will get familiar with a collection of writing techniques. Some of the topics we will be discussing are:

• Simple question technique
• Exceptional benefit
• Social proof
• Framing
• Barriers and boosters
• And many more…

7. Testing, analytics, and optimization

In the previous classes, we discussed how to design good conversational experiences, in this class, you will learn how to test those experiences and how to continuously improve them.

Here are some of the things you will learn:

• Wizard of Ozz testing
• Which metrics to track
• How to identify opportunities
• How to design ab-tests
• How to measure ab-tests

We will also discuss how to create a winning team that is always on the lookout for improvements and keeps the operation going at full speed.

It is the final class that is going to make sure that you properly execute the principles you have learned throughout the course in a professional and data-driven manner.

Final words

Conversation Design is a new and important field. Chatbots and voice assistants are in desperate need of a better ux, but it’s just the start. Humans and bots will live and work together, and for that to be successful, they need to learn how to communicate with each other. That’s where the Conversation Designer shows its value.

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